Fighting for the Facebook “like” and Google “+1″

The Facebook Like and Google’s +1 are two ways for people to recommend content to their friends without bothering them. These social signals are very important to me when they come from legitimate people because I believe that social sharing like this is one of the strongest driving forces behind visitors and conversions.

Social sharing wasn’t always like this. In the past if you wanted to share a link you had to publicly post it. The problem with that is 99% of your friends wouldn’t be interested in the link. However, now you can recommend content to your friends only when they need it.

Here’s an example. Somebody wants to compare Pikachu vs. Charizard so they land on our forum and they love the content on that page. If they wanted to recommend that page, they give it a Google +1 or a Facebook Like. Then, when anyone in their social circle searches for something similar on Google, they see the recommendation by the search result. The beauty of this is that recommendations show only when someone else is searching for the same thing!

Most of my friends have upwards of 300 friends on social networks. That means that for every legitimate “+1″ or “Like” (among others) that a site receives, its reach will probably increase by over 300 people. If any of these people search anything similar to what the original social sharer searched, they will see the personal recommendation and you can be sure that they’ll click through and browse around the site.