I know, I’ve had a lot of Like button posts. So I’m sorry, here’s another one.
I just wanted to point out that the call to action is not always appropriate. While I think the Like button has potential to really change the way that content is aggregated (as long as Facebook makes some fixes), I have some big problems with seeing it on every page.
Blue Fountain Media (a great SEO Agency in New York), reported a similar example after Gary Coleman’s death. TMZ’s site showed a like button. And those innocent content sharers, were trying to innocently show their friends the news they’d just found. It was, after all, shocking. As a result of everyone’s sharing the article, Gary Coleman’s death was “liked” by nearly 4,000 people.
Now, it may have been inadvertent. No one actually had to click the “like” button in order to get the article to count among the likes. In fact, if you share and article on facebook, the article will be counted as liked. On my blog for example, I have an article with a picture of a camel spider in it. Google the word, it ranks really well in image search. Even before I’d put the like or share buttons on the site, I had nearly 54 people who had put it on facebook. And now, no matter whether you click the “share” button or the “like” button, the counts on both will increase. Likes are a bit of a false positive. It’s a call to action that isn’t really signaling everyone’s intention. Sometimes, people are just wanting to “share” an article, and they get flagged as a person who “likes” the article… I don’t know what I ultimately think about that or if I even really care, but I do, at the very least, think it’s amusing.
The first time I noticed this was on an obituary posting I saw a long time ago on a local town newspaper’s site. Then more recently, I saw it on articles about the Craigslist killer’s article. I understand why people might like the outcome of that case, but seriously, inappropriate.
And then again today, I noticed the like button on BuzzFeed’s article on the girl who is taped throwing puppies into the water. Really? 3,000 people like this? I doubt it…
