How to Turn Your Likes into Revenue

Monetizing Your Facebook Like Button

Interested in learning how to turn your “likes” into revenue? Here’s your chance.

What do you think of the Like button? Just a simple way to say you that you like something on a website? Well, it’s much more than that. It can actually help you reach more customers and drive ROI.

Let’s start at step one: What is the like button? No, we’re not talking about the “like” on a Facebook page. It’s on websites and is a way to show that you like the content, product, etc. The Like button lets a user share content with friends on Facebook. When the user clicks the Like button on a website, a story appears in the user's friends' News Feed with a link back to the website.

Facebook recently announced it reached 750 million users worldwide, 50 percent of which return daily. This means that many of your website visitors are actually logged into Facebook when they land on your site. Because of this, it is vital to find ways to present social interactions to them immediately, such as the Like button.

People are discovering and sharing information in new ways every day. Way back when, spreading news via “word of mouth” literally meant by speaking from the mouth. Fast forward to the days of printing and it meant that people would actually cut newspaper clippings and send interesting articles to friends via mail (through the postal service if you can believe it). Nowadays, sharing is much easier. When browsing the Internet, you’ll see a Like or Recommend button strategically placed so that you can easily share what you’ve found with your friends. The Like button helps amplify word of mouth by creating dialogue between users, their friends and friends of friends. If we like what we read, it’s simple enough to Like it and boom! You’ve shared it with your entire network. Plus a million more if your friends share it too. Talk about a broad reach.

Let’s go back to marketing 101. Do you remember the marketing funnel?

                                           Awareness
                                             Interest
                                            Decision
                                              Action

Well, as great as that used to be, there’s now such thing as the marketing loop. Think of this as a continuous circle: Awareness » interest » decision » action » recommendation » back to awareness.

It’s a cycle that encourages your users to be your brand advocates, who tell their friends and those friends tell their friends and so on. It creates a viral loop, which we know is every marketer’s (and brand’s) dream.

The Like button is also a great way to increase referral traffic. We know that once you like something it’s published to your friends’ newsfeeds and to the user’s profile, but did you know it also allows marketers (the business) to publish back to those users who liked that particular page. For example, if you Liked a blue jacket on Facebook the marketer can update those same users who Liked the blue jacket and suggest they look at the black jacket, too.

The best practices for the Like button are as follows:

• Have open graph tags. Implement open graph tags in HTML headers so that you’re able to pull the correct image, title, description, etc. so your story comes out looking the way you planned.
• Position your like button for maximum impact. Put it above the fold, next to an image, and leave some white space so a user will actually see it. Make sure it’s visible and obvious what the user is liking.
• Enable and encourage comments. Allow enough space for a comments box to appear. User generated content leads to better distribution.
• Show faces where possible. When a friend of the user already Liked it, their profile picture will show up next to the Like button. Show faces where possible.
• Follow up: publish back, view insights and optimize. Remarket, update your users who Liked, and view insights to see how your Like button is working.

The average media site integrated with an optimized like button sees a 300% increase in referral traffic. So what’s not to like about the Like button?

This blog was inspired by “Facebook: Monetize the Like Button,” a webinar by Adobe and Facebook. Check out the webinar to see how to optimize and monetize your Facebook Like button.