Facebook Like button for sessions or entire conference?

Question

I'm putting together an online conference program. The conference has hundreds of sessions.

When adding a Facebook Like button, I'm trying to decide:

Choice 1: All the Like buttons should like the conference as a whole.

Pluses and minuses:

• + Higher like counts will seem much more impressive to viewers.
• + Will reach 30 likes much faster for Insight metrics
• - No way to Like an individual Presenter or Session

Choice 2: Individual Like buttons for each Presenter and Session.

• + People are able to Like an individual Presenter or Session
• - Much lower like counts will not seem impressive to viewers.
• - Will take much longer to reach 30 likes for a specific Presenter/Session for Insight metrics

Since the name of the game is high Like numbers, I'm thinking that choice 1 is the way to go: People liking the overall conference.

But the purist in me would like to be able to Like a specific presenter/session. But there's no "Like related items" so I can't pass the Like juice to the individual sessions etc. Right?

Advice? Thanks.

Answer 1

Why not do both? You probably need to make it clear for the session/presenter buttons that they are liking just that session or presenter not the whole thing.

Answer 2

Like buttons should refer to the page (and URL) that the user's currently visiting.

If they're on a page detailing general conference info, the like button should point to the conference URL, and clicking it will 'like the conference'.

If they're on a page detailing specific speaker info, the like button should point to the speaker details URL, and clicking it will 'like the speaker'.

Any other behaviour (e.g. a like button next to a speaker that likes the conference URL, or a like button next to a conference that likes a speaker URL) might give unexpected results. For that reason, I'd also suggest avoiding more than one Like button on a page; it should be clear what the visitor's liking, and multiple buttons could confuse that.