Facebook ditches "Become a Fan" and changes it to "Like"

Filed under: Web services, Social Software, web 2.0

If you're annoyed with constant suggestions that you "become a fan" of lame and asinine things on Facebook, here's some good news: Facebook is phasing out the term "fan," and pushing the more general "like" into its place. I'm guessing that this has something to do with the "universal like button" we posted about last week, which will allow you to use Facebook to "like" things on other websites.

In a "confidential" email to advertisers, posted online by ClickZ, Facebook laid out the upcoming changes in language. Fan pages will still be called fan pages, but instead of asking people to "become a fan on Facebook," advertisers are now supposed to say "Find us on Facebook" or "Like us on Facebook." The semantic change doesn't have much of an effect on how you'll actually use Facebook, but you'll likely find yourself adding more fan pages. It turns out that Facebook users click "like" about 3 times more often than they click "become a fan."

Facebook wants big fan pages, because it increases the amount of useful metadata they can collect and monetize. They'll profit more by knowing about everything you kind of like, instead of just the things you care about enough to call yourself a "fan" of. Also, because someone always leaves this in the comments: no, there is still no dislike button.

Facebook ditches "Become a Fan" and changes it to "Like" originally appeared on Download Squad on Tue, 30 Mar 2010 12:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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