Steve Woods, a freelance web designer and ASP.NET MVC Developer from Hull in the UK

One thing that really stood out for me was something so simple you have to wonder at its genius. The like button.

 

You're probably familiar (at least if you use Facebook) with the like button. Essentially its purpose is to announce that you like a specific item someone has posted, be it a URL, a video or a picture, so that your friends on Facebook can see that you enjoyed it.

 

What Facebook have done is bring that Like button to the entire web. Any page. Any image. Any piece of content. You can announce that you like anything at all no matter which site it is featured on. All you have to do is incorporate a single line of code into your existing website which points to the item you wish to 'like'. This results in something like the following:

 

 

This is game changing.

 

Imagine, if you will, that you're called Bob and you own Bob's Online Makeup Emporium. You're doing pretty well selling lipstick and various concoctions that I have no idea about but you want to increase traffic to your site and you stumble upon this new 'Like' plugin. You spend two or three minutes integrating the code into your website and to test it out you load up a browser, visit your Makeup Emporium, select one of the products and click "Like".

 

By liking that product what you have done is told Facebook that you liked the product. Facebook adds something like this to your profile:

 

Pretty cool. But the beauty of it is in its simplicity. You haven't just liked something, you've told every single person on your Facebook contact list that you liked something because they see the same thing on their Facebook news feed. What if you have 500 friends, and they all think "hmm, I like lipstick I'll check that out..." then click on that link? You know what happens, they arrive on the page and potentially buy the product, but if they TOO click on 'Like' then they announce to all of their friends on Facebook in exactly the same way. If they have 500 more friends, then that's another 500 potential purchasers. Who, if they too 'Like' the item, will in turn announce it to all of their friends This is huge.

 

The reason this is so massive is because traditionally you had to reach out with AdWords based on specific keywords, paying a premium to be top of the sponsored listings, or employ various tricks and techniques to shoehorn yourself to the top of Google's listings. 

 

Now, however, all you have to do is Like something and there's an immediate potential snowball effect. One "Like" turns into 10 "Likes", which turns into 50 "Likes" which in turn gets exponentially bigger and bigger and bigger. Each one of these visitors is a potential customer (because who doesn't like things that their friends like?) and you have to do zero marketing to encourage it - your friends and their friends and their friends' friends are doing it for you - simply because you have provided a product that people like.

 

Expect to see loads of these Like buttons on sites from now on - you'd have to be crazy to pass up the opportunity to appeal to such a massive potential market with barely any outlay or effort required.

 

Oh - and well done Facebook!