The Facebook Like Button Placement Guide for Websites

The following is an excerpt from the Facebook Marketing Bible, the comprehensive guide to marketing your company, app, brand, or website using Facebook. The full version of this article, available through a Facebook Marketing Bible subscription, includes an explanation of which Like buttons have publishing capabilities, strategies for adding Like buttons to brand websites, social games, and web apps, and more content types that news, shopping, and review sites can add Like buttons to.

Facebook’s Like button can help a variety of sites forge communication channels with their visitors and generate referral traffic from Facebook. We’ve previously published a Like button style guide for choosing between the various Like button formats, and a walk-through of how to pick the Open Graph meta tags that will maximize the lifetime value of your Like buttons. In the third installment of this series on using the Like button, we’ll look at examples of what kinds of content sites can add Like buttons to and what types of posts to publish to those who click these buttons.

Articles –  Placing lightweight Like buttons on articles allow users to quickly share them with friends, but the button’s owner can’t publish future news feed updates to those who click.Authors – Add Like buttons for authors to their dedicated author profiles, next to their by-line in articles they’ve written, or simply at the beginning or end of any of their articles. Then publish any new stories, quotes, or insights by that author to all those who’ve clicked their Like button. For example, news site The Independent has added a Like button to one of its authors, Simon Carr.

Topics – Rather than putting lightweight Like buttons on articles, news sites can tie Like buttons to a topic discussed within the article. When future articles discuss the same topic, sites can reuse the same Like button, and publish these articles as news feed updates to those who’ve already clicked the button. For example, a Like button could be created for Barack Obama, healthcare, or the iPhone 4.

Review Subjects – By placing a standard Like button on the subjects being reviewed, such as a restaurant or film, users can express their affinity for that thing to their friends, and opt in to receive news feed updates whenever news reviews of it are added. For example, a site could add Like buttons to Bender’s Bar & Grill, or the film Aladdin.

Products – Placing Like buttons on each item an ecommerce store carries gives users a quick way to share with friends, driving additional sales. The site can then publish news feed stories to those who’ve clicked the buttons about when items are put on sale, almost out of stock, restocked, or redesigned. This button can also be shown at the end of the checkout flow, making it easy for users to share the news of their purchase with friends. For example, a bike store could put the Like button on the new Tommaso road bike.

Access the full Like button placement guide for websites containing strategies for more types a sites, a review of the functionalities of different Like buttons, and a walk-through of how to publish to Like buttons, as well as the other parts of our series on the Like button in the Facebook Marketing Bible, Inside Network’s industry leading resource for marketing and advertising on Facebook.

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