subject: Look. Like. Want. [print this page] Relatively speaking, the Facebook Like button has been around for a while. The small and iconic plug-in occupies a significant portion of modern marketing industry thought and influences a great deal of every industrys marketing strategy. Achieving the ultimate interaction paradigm see, Like, Share is a goal for every online blog ever written, product ever promoted or video ever created. Its the thing that jobs are won and lost over and the thing that gains headlines, market share and new clients or the thing that loses them.
In recent years, weve seen extensions of Facebooks original Like button. Derivatives have spidered out from the Mark Zuckerburgs concept to now serve as prime features on blog feeds, Pinterest, competitor Google+ and more. Now however, Zuckerburg plans to take the Like concept another step forward toward even more greatly enhanced corporate relevancy.
Setting goals for the stuff we want to attain is nothing new. As kids we make Christmas lists; as adults we make bucket lists; and now as members of social media communities we have the ability to pin, post pictures of or share our personal wish lists with the world. The Facebook Want button only adds another share option to the aspirational social sharing were already performing. We already live in a commoditized society, so its no wonder that as Facebooks stock continues to fall, it has continues to evolve ways to make its platform more appealing to advertisers and investors.
But, does the Want button take things a step too far?
Social media results research indicates almost unilaterally that the companies gaining the most from platforms like Facebook do so by utilizing the network in the same way that traditional users do. They share content and voice their social commentary with a personable tone and they arent pushy. Heavy-handed sales messages, bland corporate news posts and awkward, me-me-me promotional contests rarely gain ground for the companies who post them, so it should come as no surprise that social sharing, aspirational or not, originally gained momentum because users felt it benefited them. For this reason, some marketing analysts predict that the Facebook made a mistake when it added the Want button.
For a user, Want-ing something is a blatant call-to-action to corporations to market to them and its one thats easy to pick up on. Consumers resist pushy social media sales pitches for the same reason they may potentially boycott the Want button it dares to openly commodify them.
The jury is still out on what the overall impact of the Facebook Want button will be, but The Social Network desperately needs to discover an update that upgrades the value of their stock before both of advertisers and users lose interest.
