Is Facebook following you for Social Media?
Posted by Patrick Murphy on Tue, Apr 20, 2010
Yesterday the Financial Times ran a report on Facebook's launch of their new "Like" button. The Financial Times formed a view that maybe Facebook would use data from these interactions to target them with related adverts once they return to Facebook.com. While Facebook is currently targets ads based on what information users fill out in their profile, including location, age, gender, and favourite activities and music bands this would be a completely new strategy. Possibly this is not very social from the leader in social media and contenting people.
However the social media giant, facebook did come back by denying that its new content-sharing button will allow it to serve advertising based on its users' web history. Facebook did say that new ‘like' button has been likened to tools sites like Twitter have developed to enable users to share content they like from around the web - with the rest of their social network. And they did go on to say that it will not use this tool to track its users' web behaviour in order to deliver highly targeted advertisements when they return to Facebook.com.
The story was picked up by a number of people in the States including HubSpot who have a huge following before Facebook responded to the Financial Times article. So I was very curious to see if there was any backlash to the Financial Times article. Well it is no surprise that Facebook is still viewed very Favourable with a 96% rating.
If you look at the picture above there were 340 motions that had negative comments or articles about Facebook like this from www.clarionledger.com.
But overall it seems that the article went unnoticed online, is this to do with the user base of Facebook. Maybe they just do not read the financial Times. If you are wondering how to start any form of social media is with blogging. So this week SiliconCloud are running a free webinar on blogging for business to help you understand how and why to blog for business. Register here: Blogging for Business