Sunday, June 27, 2010

To like or to share, that is the question!

y big question, can you have a combined facebook/bookmark and facebook/like icon? Are they distinct?   As I researched this question, I found this row of icons on a forum....

{Grrr. it's not cutnpasting...take a look:}
http://www.v7n.com/forums/social-network-marketing/196383-facebook-like-vs-bookmark.html#post1425406

 Background.  Like many, I have littered my sites with little icons or widgets such as the following:
Digg! del.icio.us

But, my other sites have other icons related to bookmarking such as:
Share to Facebook Share to Twitter Stumble It Delicious Email This More...


Another site has a single icon which has everything in like this:
Bookmark and Share


Some others focus on RSS subscriptions:
 Subscribe in a reader


Or, we ask you to subscribe as either an email or RSS reader:




Enter your email address:
Delivered by FeedBurner


In addition to bookmarking and subscribing, you can friend (now like/facebook) or follow (twitter) or visit (facebook).

FacebookBloggerTwitteriGoogle



Visit SpellingCity on Facebook

You can write your own code or, if you google "facebook twitter icons", you'll get oodles of sites that will provide you icons and generate your code for you.  I wonder if their code will on Facebook, both create a link and an icon.
Widgetbox will give you icons and generate the code.




7 comments:

BBat50 said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
BBat50 said...

It might be that Facebook forbids it. Facebook ( http://developers.facebook.com/docs/...e/plugins/like ) says (from the bottom of the page):

By using the Like Button, you agree to the general guidelines and terms found here. You also agree that you will not modify the Like Button in any way beyond the customization options provided on this page.

BBat50 said...

I looked at one forum which does very sophisticated marketing and after each post, they pop in a set of social media icons. They have both a Facebook-share and a Facebook-like icon.

http://www.v7n.com/forums/social-network-marketing/196383-facebook-like-vs-bookmark.html#post1426119

To be clear, The Like button enables users to make connections to your pages and share content back to their friends on Facebook with one click. Since the content is hosted by Facebook, the button can display personalized content whether or not the user has logged into your site.


frankly, i'm not sure that I yet understand this area....

BBat50 said...

OK, I've been looking around, here's what I've found. On another fancy online marketing site: TopRank:

At the top of each post is a Facebook share icon. At the bottom of each post is a Facebook like icon.
1. Is it possible to have one icon do both? Why or why not?
2. Why do you put share at the top and like at the bottom?
3. Same type of question on twitter, why follow for the site in general but retweet on each post? Actually, the twitter logic makes sense to me.

BBat50 said...

I personally put the "Like" button across all of my website pages and
the "Share" button next to my ReTweet button on my blog posts. You
can see this in action at my website here:
http://windmillnetworking.com.

There really is no one answer for this. You could test some top blogs
in your industry and take a survey on how they do it, or even do an
A/B test and see which does better.

Hope the advice helps...

Best regards,
Neal

BBat50 said...

Lets assume the question is about putting Facebook icons on a NON-Facebook page. I have researched it and found two possibilities:

1- Like (previously friend) - makes the visitor a fan of OUR Facebook page. Can only be used if the webpage has an associated Facebook page. It's done with an iframe.

2 - Share (previously bookmark) - creates a link to the webpage on the user's profile page. Perhaps preferable for SEO. http://www.addthis.com/bookmark.php?...

Aileenwo.com said...

Hi

Never cross my mind to combine facebook like and share together. It's a very good question. I've email to facebook about this, hopefully i will get their reply soon