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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.

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2 Answers 2

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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.

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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.

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  • any source for your assertion that Like buttons should refer to the current page? The Like button api includes the "href" option - the URL to like.
    – Larry K
    Commented May 12, 2011 at 15:07
  • Only that Facebook provides a separate protocol called 'Open Graph' for liking things that aren't pages: developers.facebook.com/docs/opengraph This is used by IMDB, for example, to allow visitors to like 'things' on the page that represent real-world objects, rather than the page itself. It could equally be used for conferences and speakers too.
    – Nick
    Commented May 12, 2011 at 15:14

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