Facebook announced yesterday that its now famous Like button just celebrated its one year birthday. Really? Only one? The concept is so familiar and widespread that if seems as though the Like button has been around forever–ever prompting me to analyze an image, judge another person’s comment or a reveal to the world all the things I find agreeable. The concept is mind blowing in its engaging simplicity.
According to the company’s press page, there are over 500 million Facebook users (the US population is about 311 million) who collectively spend over 700 billion minutes a month on the site. Those are staggering numbers, and it’s a revealing trend that’s identifiable through all the different ways individuals and companies try and capitalize on the social networking platform. The fact that people are spending more and more time seeking out and sharing information using social media only underscores the importance of working to maximize a social strategy for any company.
For many businesses and ecommerce sites, the counter on the Facebook wall that reveals how many people like the page is the obvious indicator of hypothetical success. While enterprise ecommerce stores push brand messaging and media outlets post breaking news, tens of millions of people make the decision to click that little button of approval.
In March, Practical Ecommerce looked at over 1000 Facebook pages and identified a list of the most prevalent brands (whose Likes tend to grow by the millions month over month). Here’s are a few of the top branded pages, and their number of Likes as of today, April 22, 2011:
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• YouTube — 31.4 million fans
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• Coca Cola — 25.3 million fans
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• Starbucks — 21 million fans
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• Disney — 20.5 million fans
• MTV — 19.8 million fans
So thank you Like, and Happy Birthday. Your simple concept has become a powerful mechanism in how some degree of modern popularity is measured. In an act of appreciation for such ingenuity, more than 38 million users of Facebook now Like the social media site. Just to make sure the impact of that number resonates, the entire population of Canada consists of roughly 34 million people.
That’s also about 37, 999, 850 million more friends than I have on my own personal page. And in all honesty, what’s not to Like?
—Jared—
Jared Matkin is a staff writer for HotWax Media with a background in PR, Branding and Marketing. He’s also a light-hearted and an opinionated character who will join other HotWax Media employees and advisers in periodically posting his thoughts on topics ranging from enterprise eCommerce to business and technology.
