Facebook Fans Become “Likes”

Starting today, you can no longer become a fan of Facebook Fan Pages.  Instead, you have the option of “liking” the page much like you would with a friend’s wall post, picture, or other profile feature.  While this might sound like a big change, this does not effect the functionality of fan pages as your posts will show up in your fans’ news feeds and you have the ability to still send updates to all of your fans.

Facebook is hoping by rolling out these changes, fan pages will see an increase in the number of fans (or “likes”).  Personally, I believe that by implementing this change, it will increase the number of connections, but it won’t necessarily have much else of an impact.  Think about all the times you’ve liked something on Facebook.  How many items that you’ve liked over the past week have you actually gone and revisited again? “Liking” something is already associated with an action item that you do spur of the moment, not something you visit and participate in frequently (which many users do with fan pages).

In any event, make sure to check your Facebook data over the next few weeks to see any significant differences in the number of fans, unsubscribed fans, visits / unique visitors, and interactions to see the true impact this change has on your page.