Facebook “Likes” – Is it setup correctly?

With social media and Facebook taking off as fast as it has and privacy concerns starting to catch up, it’s important to understand things like Facebook “Likes” and if you are accomplishing what you want.  The entire point of Facebook “Likes”, in “Liking” a page, is to show others what your interests are and help show your support for businesses. Let’s break this down a bit.

On one hand, you can keep your friends and family informed of what you are interested in.  This makes it convenient for your friends to see what present to buy you for your birthday, etc.  And it also helps as far as a dating service to some extent, where you can actually meet other people online that share the same interests as you.  Now, this get’s split into two pieces.

1. If you just want to keep your friends informed, you might want your privacy settings to only allow friends to see your likes.
2. If you want to meet someone new, you probably want to set your privacy settings (only for “Likes”) to be public.  (Continue reading below)

Likes

With the privacy settings, you can choose privacy settings for each category of “likes” including Music, books, movies, television, activities, interests, inspirational people, and other page “likes”. Chose the appropriate setting for each category as mentioned above.

Besides personal information as above, the other reason to share likes is for supporting business.  You might want to show your support for my company Twinbytes for example.  If you like www.Facebook.com/TwinbytesInc the count for how many people like the page goes up.  Regardless of your security settings for privacy.

Here’s the difference; if your privacy settings are set to yourself only or friends only, the company (Twinbytes in this example) will not see who you are.  The company page you “liked” will only see that someone else liked their page, but will not see who it is that liked it.  If you want them to know who you are for some reason, so they know you “liked” their page, then you would need to set your privacy setting for page likes to public.

PrivacyOK, so the question now is why would you want to make your page likes be public so they can see you like their page?  There’s only one reason you might want to do this that I can think of, but you can post your comments below if you can think of other reasons.  The reason that comes to mind, using Twinbytes again as an example, is we do contests every month.  If we draw a winner and go to verify that you have liked the page, we can’t see that you like it because of your privacy settings, or maybe you just really didn’t like it?  We can’t tell the difference, therefore you don’t qualify to win. 🙁

Here’s a possible solution.  Set all your “likes” for interests, activities, movies etc to friends only or whatever you want.  But for other pages change it to public since other pages are not associated with your specific interests, hobbies, etc.  The pages are strictly showing everyone what companies or products you are proud to support and recommend.  It’s basically your public recommendation to all Facebook users.  You are doing all those companies a favour by truly showing your support beyond just “liking” their page.  You are then promoting their page for them.  This is why Twinbytes is happy to do giveaways in thanks for your support.

Comments 1