Live, ‘Like’ and Learn – how to integrate Facebook with your website

PART 1: Like, Recommend or Share?

You may notice on some websites a proliferation of social media buttons. It can be a confusing array of options. From Facebook it’s likely you’ll see just two (Like/Recommend, and Share) – hopefully now just one (Like/Recommend). To clear up the confusion, Like and Recommend are essentially the same button, it’s just that the developer of the site can choose the verb.

In the early days of Facebook integration it was the Share button that dominated. You see a page you want to tell people about, click the button and you’re taken to a Facebook ‘holding’ page where you can choose to write a comment and/or choose an image scraped from the page’s DNA (the tech term is metadata). Of course, you can still do this. The Share button is still available to integrate with your site – but only by remnant independent plugins, not directly from the Facebook Developers site. However it has some serious drawbacks, now that Facebook newsfeeds are so full of rich content and an increasingly crowded arena. Facebook spokeswoman Malorie Lucich tells us (with a perhaps unintentional, but all the same ironic, concluding line) that while they’ll continue to support the Share button, Like is the “recommended solution moving forward.” (via Mashable http://mashable.com/2010/09/09/facebook-like-share-button/). In short, if you want your page or product to stand out in a plethora of competing posts, you need to make sure you configure your buttons (if you pardon the expression).

The problem with the Share button is this: it’s more work and time. You manually have to choose a featured image to go with the post. You are taken to the holding page, which takes a few more seconds to load. Furthermore, you the page owner (where the Share button is situated), don’t have as much control. If there’s more than one image on your page, then the person who Shares, may not choose the image to post which is what you want to appropriately illustrate the content it’s associated with. That’s important. I’ll show you an example below.

The good thing about the Like/Recommend (or LR for short, now) buttons is that you can do a whole load of configuration, not possible with Share. As mentioned above, dropping a post into a Facebook newsfeed is like playing pooh sticks on the rapids. It may get drowned in a plethora of competing content. You need to really make sure that what you’re letting people post is as rich and appropriate content as you can make it.

So, how do you choose Like or Recommend? It’s really up to you. The convention appears to be (but isn’t set in stone) that if it’s a serious news article or more formal document, then you would tend to Recommend it. For everything else, the default tends to be Like. The verb is very easy to change in the configuration.

Depending on how you set up your LR buttons you should be able to allow people to comment on the content they’ve just Liked or Recommended. It is the default option, unless you choose to shrink your LR button area to below a minimum threshold. It’s all explained in the notes Facebook provides with the button pages on its Developers pages.

Coming up in Part 2: How to get the right featured image configured (with the Open Graph Protocol)

Later: Linking your Fan Page to your website and other useful Facebook social plugins and insights.