Facebook Like button

[Savage]

Yesterday evening I added a Facebook "Like" button to each blog post. A friend told me that adding this to his blog increased his traffic by 20% overnight, and he was getting a lot of traffic to begin with. So I figured it would be an interesting thing to test.

It seems the buttons show zero likes by default until they get at least one click from someone to update the counter for that post, which pulls in all the previous Likes that people may have done in the past. Anyone know how someone could have Like'd a post before the Like buttons were added? Obviously it's possible to do that since there were so many pre-existing Likes.

If you see a post with zero likes, feel free to click the Like button and then refresh the page in your browser to update the current count. You can immediately "unlike" it afterwards if you prefer not to add to the count.

I see that "10 Reasons You Should Never Get a Job" has over 4K likes. That's the most Like'd post I've found so far:
10 Reasons You Should Never Get a Job

It's interesting to see how many Likes there are for old posts I published before Facebook even had a Like button feature.

I <3 timeless content.

I didn't use a WordPress plug-in for this btw. I got the code from Facebook's developer section and then added it to my WordPress templates. You can get it for free at:
Like Button - Facebook Developers

Anyone using this already? What results have you seen so far?

[Marc Robertson]

I've "liked" a few of your articles. It is a nice feature to help share various articles. It's effect would be nullified if someone has a huge number of other likes on their page. For this reason, I am not going to "like" more than a few pages at a time. It is nice that it works right out of the gate. Conversely, I believe that it's impact will grow over time.

Your "10 Reasons You Should Never Get A Job" has given me quite a bit of mileage. A few months ago, an ex had a status indicating that she was desperately looking for a job. I posted a link to the article. She was less than impressed, but a number of her friends loved it. Now, they can "like" it too.

[moonrambler]

Originally Posted by Steve Pavlina

It seems the buttons show zero likes by default until they get at least one click from someone to update the counter for that post, which pulls in all the previous Likes that people may have done in the past. Anyone know how someone could have Like'd a post before the Like buttons were added? Obviously it's possible to do that since there were so many pre-existing Likes.

This is really confusing to me.

[Brutha]

It seems the buttons show zero likes by default until they get at least one click from someone to update the counter for that post, which pulls in all the previous Likes that people may have done in the past. Anyone know how someone could have Like'd a post before the Like buttons were added? Obviously it's possible to do that since there were so many pre-existing Likes.

People share links to websites over facebook. Everytime a person share a link his friends can click on like.

[Savage]

Originally Posted by Brutha

People share links to websites over facebook. Everytime a person share a link his friends can click on like.

I figured it was something like that.

[Boreas]

I hear there is a debate between the like button and the share button, where "share" requires a higher commitment but also gets more visibility.

As is facebook is the number two site in the world and is sure to start driving a lot of traffic. I added the like buttons through addthis, but did not get that much of a boost. That said, I am not too high traffic yet.

You have done podcasts, facebook, and twitter. Now it is time for youtube Steve! Give us some videos. ^_^

[Boreas]

Clean ones.