PR Case Study: The Facebook Like Button

Facebook intro­duced the Like but­ton in 2009.

The impact of the Like but­ton has been sig­ni­fic­ant cul­tur­ally, ana­lyt­ic­ally, struc­tur­ally, eco­nom­ic­ally etc. ¹Facebook Like but­ton. (2023, February 3). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_like_button

It’s one of the most influ­en­tial PR cam­paigns of all time.

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Background: A New Feature for Interaction

Today, it seems obvi­ous that you can inter­act with almost any social object by simply lik­ing it. But this was­n’t always the case.

Activity: Tapping the Engagement Pyramid

By imple­ment­ing the Facebook Like but­ton, the social net­work was able to tap into much lar­ger parts of the engage­ment pyr­am­id as it gave users an oppor­tun­ity to inter­act eas­ily besides shar­ing and commenting.

Adding new means of basing decisions on social proof often leads to increased social engage­ment, too.

Likes from users also sent high-value social sig­nals via noti­fic­a­tions to con­tent pub­lish­ers, thus con­form­ing them to adapt their out­put as a form of dir­ect audi­ence feed­back, increas­ing engage­ment on both sides.

Result: Multi-Level Data Opt-In

The Like but­ton did­n’t just affect indi­vidu­al online beha­viours. It also provided Facebook with a wealth of new data to fur­ther optim­ise the algorithm and fine-tune the user exper­i­ence — and later also provide addi­tion­al data to fine-tune their pro­gram­mat­ic ad model.

Most sig­ni­fic­antly, but often over­looked his­tor­ic­ally, is that Facebook also provided the Like but­ton as a social plu­gin, allow­ing web­site own­ers to add Facebook Like func­tion­al­ity to their platforms.

Facebook quickly gained data-track­ing access to almost the entire inter­net — and web­site own­ers did all the work for them and provided their data for free in exchange for get­ting their con­tent more eas­ily shared on the social net­work site.

Insight: Change the Internal Polarity

When we think of fea­tures and func­tions as PR pro­fes­sion­als, we have a tend­ency to think of them as stan­dalone com­mu­nic­a­tion activ­it­ies. “We’re now launch­ing a new fea­ture or function.”

However, the real story is often to be found with­in new infra­struc­tures. It’s often the infra­struc­ture that provides impact. By think­ing of fea­tures and func­tions dif­fer­ently, we can begin ask­ing dif­fer­ent types of questions: