Why Do You Click Like Or Share?
Why do you "Like" or "Share" on a post or photo on Facebook or elsewhere?
What makes you decide to click the "Like" or "Share" button?
Are you typically compelled to click the "Like" button in order to indicate "agreement with," or "support for," or to notify the person posting that you are "listening to them" or "paying attention" to them?
Are you typically inclined to click the "Share" button when you come across an item that you "think" may be of interest to others who may not have discovered it or may never see it because they may not be "friends" of the account that posted it?
Do you know the difference between who will see your post when you update your status on your timeline versus when you go to another user's timeline and submit a post there instead of posting on your own timeline?
I observe (and have tested and verified) that the complex privacy, security and friend settings of Facebook and its filtering algorithms can make it difficult for the average FB user to understand for sure who is seeing or not seeing items they post on their status, in groups, in events, on photo tags, as subscribers, etc. You need to be a tech guru to figure it out. 🙂
In fact, I receive dozens of game, birthday calendars and other application requests everyday from different friends many of whom probably do not even know that they sent me an invitation to the game or app. The way that happens is that when we test a game or use an app, the fine print in the security settings may tell you (if you are techy enough to even understand it) that as soon as you click the "allow" button, that game or application is going to send everyone on your friend list an invitation. I do not accept any of them for my account because if I did, everyone of my friends would receive invitations that I did not intentionally send. Some invitations are sent automatically as a function of activating the game or app. Good marketing for them, but the practice can be annoying for friends of those who are testing or playing games, etc. and who do not realize what happens the moment they click the "allow" button.
I also observe that some Facebook users seem to check their friends list incessantly to see who has unfriended them. Some even get offended that a person unfriends them. In reality, if a Facebook user does not know how to stop receiving updates from a friend they may "unfriend" them just to reduce the amount of information coming through their timeline and because they do not know how to keep a person "friended" while turning off receipt of the friend's updates.
The point is that all this technology can result in very skewed perceptions about who is seeing what or who is inviting who or who likes who, etc. when the reality is that many of those perceptions may be skewed because of a lack of understanding about how the technology actually works and who is seeing or not seeing what. This also applies to other communication and advertising technology than just Facebook.
For example, a Facebook user with 1000 friends monitoring all the posts from all 1000 friends would have a full time job just viewing all that comes to them, so that Facebook user may turn off the updates from 990 of those friends and only view updates from 10 of their 1000 friends. Another Facebook users with only 10 friends may view all updates from all 10 of their 10 friends. So while the Facebook user with 1000 friends may have access to, and the ability to view, more information, that does not mean they actually do so.
In another post we'll discuss Facebook's crackdown on duplicate accounts. Do you have one or two or three?
Soooooooooo that all said,
Why do you "Like" or "Share" a post or photo?
What makes you decide to click the "Like" or "Share" button?
