When one of my friends on Facebook pointed out yesterday that there was now a “Like” button next to each comment on a Facebook post or status, I sort of rolled my eyes. To me, that just seemed to be overkill. I mean, know that the Like button has made it’s way outside of the walls for Facebook and into the rest of the Internet (including one of my sites), but trying to push it down another level of detail into the comment thread didn’t really seem necessary.
So, I went looking for an official post or other blog coverage of this new feature, and I found myself at the popular Inside Facebook blog. Here’s the article I found:
Facebook Adds Likes to Comments
To my surprise – and who am I to judge – they reported that this is actually a commonly requested feature. For real? People are asking to have a Like button when someone comments on their status or the status of a friend? I think I may just be missing the point.
What’s Really Missing
To me, I think the bigger gap related to comments to posts and statuses is not a Like button, but better notification and comment tracking for Facebook Page admins. As an admin of 4 pages currently, it’s less than ideal for me to have to check each one everyday or every other day to feel responsive to my visitors. And I know it would be difficult to create a reasonable solution that works for both smaller pages like mine vs. the thousands of comments on the page of your favorite championship sports team, but still, it feels like there’s more value to be made there.
As another example, I have a few photographer friends that have created Facebook pages to share their work. When they post photos and people comment, there’s no notification or anything. Now I know first hand in the case of photos there is a View Comments page – like this one – but would a subscribe or RSS feed option be too much to ask? Or maybe something similar to the Facebook Page Digest emails we admins received weekly for a brief while. Something daily like that might work to show a summary instead of each individual comment.
Any Insight?
I know that Facebook has been working to improve their Insights stats section, and I can only hope that those tools start getting closer to real-time soon. It’s Thursday night as I finish this post and stats are only current through Tuesday. Again, not horrible from a longer range trend perspective, but not a tool I can use for engagement.
Your Thoughts?
Getting back to topic, do you think the Like button for comments is a useful feature or just more fluff? And if you’re a Facebook Page admin, I’d sure like to hear your thoughts – or any tricks or tools – on staying current with engaging your visitors.
Thanks for reading,
– Kris
