Facebook Like Button

I’d find it hard to believe that anyone hasn’t heard about Facebook’s new bag of tricks popping up all throughout the internet like a wildfire through the California hills.

That said, here is why you should care about Facebook’s new “Like” button.

The Like button is a great feature to offer your website visitors as it allows everyone who visits your site a one click opportunity to promote your site to their friends. It takes no effort on their part, and from a web facilitator it takes very little effort on your end to offer this.

But Mike, I don’t have a Facebook account so I don’t care about Facebook!

That’s fine if your company or you don’t have a Facebook page, it doesn’t change the fact that many of your visitors more than likely do, and why wouldn’t you want your visitors to promote your business? If it helps, think of the Like button as Social Media outreach for dummies combined with an Affiliate system that doesn’t require you to pay anyone and you’re on the right track in your thinking. If it really matters to you, you can add in the code and still not have a Facebook account.

But I looked at their developer page and saw the word developer in the title and got scared because I don’t code!

While Facebook has given many sites a ton of features that integrate anywhere from fully to not really, you don’t need to be a code master to add a Like button to your website. Below is the code from Facebook’s Developer page.

<iframe src=”http://www.facebook.com/widgets/like.php?href=http://example.com

scrolling=”no” frameborder=”0″

style=”border:none; width:450px; height:80px“></iframe>

Simply paste this anywhere in your site to have it show up and work. The only change you need to make is changing the bold sections for the URL and the Style. So change http://example.com to the URL you’re trying to promote. For a blog like this I just use http://www.michaelghurston.com as I have this code above my sidebar widget on every page. For places like SanJose.org it makes more sense to personalize the URL a bit more such as http://www.sanjose.org/visitor or http://www.sanjose.org/meetings The width and height can be adjusted as needed. If you’re unsure what 450px versus 300px wide is, simply keep playing with it until you’re happy.

The only downside I’ve come across so far is the widget likes to show a white background (no matter how I change the code) in IE. Safari, Firefox and Chrome all display it fine though.

But I don’t want to support this as Facebook is just going to turn into a giant scary entity like Google and the Borg!

Resistance is futile.

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