The Difference Between Fan Page Likes and Website Likes ?

Facebook has likes as an action for a whole lot of different scenarios. On the site, you can like a post, or you can like a page. You can even add other emotions now, like Wow or Sad – a pithy emoticon-based way of sharing feelings so you don’t have to learn to express them with words or actions. Putting that aside, though, you also have likes originating from a website like button.

There is a functional alteration in the way all three of these likes work, and it’s one that many people don’t instinctively grasp. This is why people who buy likes targeting their website like button are confused when their page doesn’t grow. Let’s take a look at each of the likes and see how they function.

Post Likes

Post likes – and wows, and sads, and angrys, and loves – are answers to a post that allow a user to involve with a post and express something to the poster, without having to really leave a comment. Likes are mostly used as a way to acknowledge a post, without having to say you do, or come up with something else to say in adding to that credit. It’s roughly analogous to some millennials typing “lol” or “heh” in an instant message, if you’re familiar with those; it’s a way for the person receiving the message to admit that they saw it and say, at the same time, that they have nothing of value to add to that train of thought.

Post likes have a minor distribution effect. They create a “Person A has liked X post” story that is shared in the feeds of the people who are friends with person A. Facebook documented that these stories were largely ignored, though, and has been reducing how many of them show up. These days they tend to only show up for posts about trending topics.

The major problem with these stories is that it’s often hard for the friends of person A to respond to the story. If post X was made by person B, and person B has discretion settings that don’t allow contributions from non-friends, the friends of person A won’t be able to comment.

That’s a little puzzling, so let’s break it down. If Bob makes a post and has his discretion settings set in such a way that their posts are public but only friends can comment on them, it will be visible to anyone. Janet likes Bob’s post, which makes a “Janet liked Bob’s Post” story in the news feed of Bartleby. Bartleby wants to comment, but can’t, because he isn’t a friend of Bob. He can see the post, but he can’t engage with it.

Page Likes

A page like is roughly equivalent to a follow on Twitter. When Bob has a Facebook Page rather than a profile, that page works like a business page. It can accumulate followers, it can run ads, it’s limited in direct messaging, and all the other features and limitations of a page.

When you go to a page and like it, you’re promising to updates from that page in your news feed. This, too, can make “Janet has liked Bob’s page” stories in Bartleby’s feed, but in this case there’s nothing limiting Bartleby from viewing Bob’s page in its entirety. Pages don’t have “followers only” settings anymore, not since Facebook minimizing Liking a page doesn’t really grant you access to anything special on Facebook as the liker. You get the page’s posts in your feed rendering to Edge Rank, which might mean you don’t see much at all. The more you engage with a page, the more of their posts you see. The more you ignore the page, the less you see.

Liking a page does have benefits for that page, though. From the page viewpoint, they can now see some information about you. Your demographics are added to their audience demographics. You show up in reach calculations. If they want to run ads to the people who follow them and no one else, you show up as a target for those ads. The page can’t message you unless you message them first, but they are free to respond.

Page likes are what you, as a page manager and website owner, want to gather in as large a quantity as possible. Post likes don’t do a lot, because, as we mentioned, the stories aren’t generated very normally and they don’t do much for you. Parts are better, comments are better, likes are generic filler. It’s a bad thing to have no likes on a page that has a high number of followers, but that’s more because likes are a sign that your followers are active and real, rather than fakes purchased through a bot reseller..

Website Like Button Likes

This third type of like comes from social media buttons embedded on your website. When you see a Facebook like button on a blog, you’re seeing something that is, itself, a lie.

What do I mean by that? Well, if you were to click the like button next to a blog post, you would find out that it’s not actually liking anything. You’re actually sharing this post with your feed. You’ll see a URL, if you inspect the element, that looks something like this

This is a Facebook URL with a script and a parameter. The parameter is the example.com URL, which would be the URL of the blog post you’rethe sharer.php, which is the same as what you see on Facebook when you click “share” on a post.

In other words, there’s no actual “like” going on with the like button. It’s a share, which posts the URL to your Facebook feed so your friends can see it. The entrance of the shared post depends on the open graph meta data of the page you’re sharing, though you can customize it by adding your own post to the top of the link you’re sharing.

Using Website Likes

One learner mistake I see marketers making all the time is not customizing the sharing button on their site. They want to see higher numbers, so they make every social sharing button for Facebook link to their homepage. That means every accrued share from every instance of the button on their site will display the same number, which is the number of shares the homepage of the website has.

It would not be the number of page likes Amazon has – 26.6 million or so – because that’s not the action the like button takes. So not only will the number of shares not match the number of page likes the page has, that discrepancy looks bad if a user notices.

The real way you should use Facebook website like buttons is to use the default for most social sharing buttons, which is “share the page this button is currently on.” Each individual blog post will get shared on its own, and will collect shares that are made of that post, but not of the website in general. There is, tactlessly, no good way to total up all the shares of all the pages on your site without some kind of custom script pulling data from the Facebook API.

• The first trick is to ignore the like button or social sharing buttons on those page, and instead just embed the Facebook like box. This plan works because of the kinds of people who are on those pages of your site.

The second trick would be to actually include the like button, but customize it. Rather than have it share as a post the page the user is currently on, modify the sharing URL to be a landing page. Of course, all of this only works and is only valuable so long as you have an active Facebook presence. If you’re not on Facebook for one reason or another – your URL is filtered, your account is debarred, you chose not to use the site, or you didn’t get enough value to make it price the time – you’re not going to get a lot of use out of either sharing or like buttons.