Facebook’s Dislike Button and its possible effect on Business Pages!
As Mark Zuckerberg has confirmed that Facebook is now working on a much anticipated, ‘Dislike Button’, the internet is flooded with comments and articles by people across different industries.
Mark says in this video here, that the intention of the dislike button is for people to be able to express emotions like empathy towards posts where the traditional ‘Like’ would be inappropriate. Eg. on a post mentioning a loss of a loved one.
So, it’d be safe to say that although we don’t know when, the ‘Dislike’ button is coming!
As a social media marketer (Social Cutlet), I wanted to throw some light on what it could mean for businesses. It may be a little too soon to say exactly how the ‘Dislike’ button would affect Facebook’s algorithm for business pages, it’s not too early to be ready for what’s coming, especially for social media marketers.
I have already answered the question for a couple of our clients, so I thought I’d write an article about it.
When something as big is introduced on a platform as famous as Facebook, it’s common that the consequent effects are far more than intended.
How people may use it
As far as posts of friends are concerned, I don’t think there would be much deviation from the intended purpose of the dislike button and people wouldn’t just go about disliking their friends’ display pictures or posts.
As intended, they’ll get a better way of expressing empathy or simple disagreement.
Effect on Business Pages
Although we do not know for sure how the Dislike button would work for Facebook business pages, we can be pretty sure that all those fake promotions and excessive banter about services and products would bear the brunt.
When marketing on Facebook business page, we often try to drive more page likes and higher engagement; now with the Dislike button, the game might change a little bit.
All these years, the angry customers had to take the pain of writing down comments to take their frustration out, but now, with a convenient Dislike button, it’d be much easier to do so and a lot more people would be expressing their dislike.
This means that Facebook marketers would need to be more aware of what they are posting on their pages as they could quickly get a scathing dislike from a fan who dislikes the post or even finds it meaningless.
All this would mean that post automation would be pushed further along the timeline and businesses would require even more assistance of social media marketers to promote their pages.
Effect on post/page reach to the audience
As we are all aware that the reach is more important than likes, this step could still be helpful in some way. If the Dislikes work as Likes currently do on Facebook, more number of dislikes would also help spread the reach of a post.
Eg. if you happen to dislike a post on a certain page, your friend might be able to see that you did so and the post would reach him too.
And as they, “There is no such thing is bad publicity!”, Dislikes may actually be helpful if your whole intention is to piss people off to get some attention.
Well, aren’t we coming closer and closer to how it works in real life?
This is just a point of view and I still do not know how the algorithm might turn out, but it’s never too early to mend the ways we market and interact with our fans on Facebook.
There’s no point of selling combs to bald men now, it’s about making fair deals and helping people discover innovative solution to their problems.
Hope we all understand that and whether Facebook decides to punish business pages or not, the strategy should be to help our audience rather than to push our products down their throats.
By the way, Social Cutlet is turning one this October 1st and we are thankful to all of our clients who helped us grow.
Happy Marketing!
