How many times did you hit the “Unlike” button on Facebook?

There’s a lot said about the Like-button on Facebook. These days, you can find them everywhere, also, automatically added to stories about people who died in nasty accidents (what’s there to like?). In 2010 some people thought a Like would kill your blogcomments, a lot of believers say the amount of fans and likes you collect as a brand are the only true indicator for real brand engagement. And I’m convinced that there are a lot of brands that have made some KPI’s for their Facebook-efforts by creating targets for their amount of Likes. “We should have 50k Facebook fans by the end of this year, or else….”

A lot of brands are trying to get fans to engage with them on Facebook. That’s a good thing, the booming social network of Mark Zuckerberg is a great tool for enagement, it’s an evolving, dynamic social environment. A lot of brands have “walled” their Facebook-content in a way so to speak: you have to “Like” them first, before you can get “in” and see some, in most cases, facebook-only content if they do it well and work with a strategy. A nice little example is the Playboy fanpage (of course, this page is liked by 5 million men and woman for the great interviews):

Before hitting the Like button
After hitting the Like button

Walled garden
Ok, this is not about Playboy. A lot of brands are doing it this way: collecting Likes in order to get people to engage (or to have an audience to talk to). In order to see what’s behind the “walled garden of the Facebook Like” I liked and unliked (within a minute) the Facebook fanpage to make the above screenshots.

Last week, I had a Twitter-discussion with someone at a creative agency. They made a campaign for safe driving and no alcohol, with a planner to make appointments with your friends to go out. You had to like the page first, before you could use the planner. I think that’s a bit odd, as I don’t know how the planner works and how good it is, before I give my “Like”. So I tried the planner, it sucked, and I unliked again.

To like and unlike
But I don’t know how many of you do the same. How many of you follow the brands or things they “like” very actively, choosing and making the decision if you’re stil ‘on it’. And if you don’t (I can imagine) what does this tell us about the true brand engagement of, for instance, Playboy. Or for Paypal.

The “Unlike” button is, in most cases, not as easy to find as the “Like” button. On most pages that is. Is it a bad thing that companies like Playboy and Paypal try to tease Facebookers to join them, be it with boobvideo’s or free Apple iPad’s? Or is there, from a marketer’s perspective, just some kind of critical mass needed to get you tot start the interaction and conversation as a brand on Facebook. What if there was an autoreminder, send by Facebook to your inbox, saying: “Do you still like this?”. Very curious what would happen. What do you think?