What does a Facebook ‘dislike’ button mean for brands?
Facebook is set to introduce buttons to allow people to express emotions other than ‘like’, but George Pappas asks what this might mean for brands on the social network.
“Not every moment is a good moment”, said Mark Zuckerberg, as the Facebook CEO announced it is looking to introduce a ‘dislike’ button. The core intention of this move is to allow people to express emotions that aren’t necessarily positive, such as empathy. Some commentators are guessing that it may actually be an “empathise” or “sorry” button, not necessarily a ‘dislike’ one.
But what does this mean for brands?
Zuckerberg has stated publicly that Facebook will deliberately avoid negativity. With that in mind, one would automatically be encouraged by a new form of engagement. Commonly, brands are looking at core engagement metrics on Facebook such as clicks, likes, comments and shares. This new button – whether it’s an ‘empathise’ or a ‘dislike’ – excitingly adds a new engagement type. It is now easier for users to express sympathy – before this new addition, users would have to comment and share their own thoughts to express anything along these lines.
If the like button was called ‘turdballs’ with the poop emoji, would you still be delighted when people turdballed your product? What things are called and how they are perceived is different. Thats what ontology is all about.
Hmmm. I wonder whether people will start applying this in a fashion similar to the Net Promoter Score. Some people could be in for a shock.
“What does a Facebook ‘dislike’ button mean for brands?”
Similar to what a one star review means for a hotel on TripAdvisor.