Today there is a subtle change to Facebook fan pages. The message “become a fan” that was listed in the button users would click to connect to the brand was replaced with the simple word “like”.

According to the message from Facebook, they hope this action will feel much more lightweight and increase the number of connections made across the site. See below.

Increasing numbers of connections are in the interests of Facebook, of course. But are they in the interest of the companies that use the fan page service?
On the surface it would seem so, many companies judge success by the number of fans that their page generates. (Some have even estimated a monetary value to fans, something in the range of $3.60 per). By that standard, the new messaging seems like a good idea. It is easy to point to large numbers of connections as a standard for success.

However, there is another standard for success that is harder to measure. Just how engaged are those users when they click the button? Are they making any kind of emotional attachment or commitment, even a subtle one, when they make that connection? There is a very strong parallel between emotional engagement and memory retention. Valence, the extent to which we feel positively or negatively, has been linked directly with affective memory – memories that promote action in us. The kind of action that brands like to see, such as purchases or conversations.

New Wording Too Casual?

In other words, is a “like” too casual? Compared to “becoming a fan”, which bears with it certain connotations of commitment, is the new option too much of a watering down in messaging? We could also examine whether this is a bit of a trick on Facebook’s part. There are options to “like” on every user’s wall, but clicking it does not make you a fan. Is there some attempt here to pad the numbers of active fans up using conventions found elsewhere in the site?

At some point, Facebook is no doubt seeking to monetize further the fan page service. As an example, it is very hard on a fan page to implement any kind of analytics. Clever people have come up with their own solutions to this, such as using Flash or loading images from a server that can track the image loads (somewhat unreliable in our tests). However, Facebook is working on their own analytics solution, through their partnership with Adobe-owned Omniture. Will this be one service that Facebook will charge for? If so, then large numbers of fans (no matter their engagement) makes sense from a business point of view.

Facebook as a CDN

It is not hard to imagine Facebook fleshing out their business offering, starting with the fan page and going from there. Already it becomes very obvious that Facebook intends to leverage their status as a social network into a content distribution service, where the content can be contextually selected on the basis of social network connections. Facebook connect is already being used well in that regard. Check out the excellent Huffington Post social as an example of this.

As a scenario, perhaps in the future we will find it quite unusual to make any kind of purchase without first scanning our social network for recommendations, images, videos associated with that product. This would be the next iteration of Amazon Reviews, where the reviewers would be somehow some way connected to us via social graph. Our trust level for the review would be higher, because the reviewers (or perhaps it will be “commenters” or “likers”) will be associated with us. Companies like Facebook are working on making that happen. Mobile devices will enable it even further, making those networks ultimately portable.

Then again, maybe it’s just a “like” button…