For years on now Facebook users have been asking for a ‘dislike button’. Facebook never gave in to the request of their users, up until now. On September 15th 2015 Mark Zuckerberg (CEO of Facebook) announced that Facebook is working on a ‘dislike button’.
The reason why Facebook never implanted a dislike button before is because they were concerned how people would use it. Facebook wants to make sure that the button won’t be about encouraging negativity the way other sites such as YouTube and Reddit do. Mark Zuckerberg said: ‘we didn’t want to just build a dislike button because we don’t want to turn Facebook into a forum where people are voting up or down on people’s posts.
Zuckerberg explained however that in some scenarios, when, for example, a friend of yours shares something that is sad, whether it is a relative passing a way, a crisis or a relationship that ended, it may not be appropriate to press that ‘like’ button. In those cases, one might want to express empathy towards the situation. Nowadays this is not possible on Facebook, or at least not in the same simple way as liking a post. By creating an option to ‘dislike’ a status or a photo people can show their compassion.
We don’t know what the dislike button will look like yet, but there is a chance that the dislike button has a negative effect on ‘regular’ Facebook users. Although Facebook promised that the button will not be just so you can express your resentment on pictures of your friends’ baby.
However, companies, brands and retailers could definitely be affected by the dislike button. Vice president of Forrester research Inc. Sucharita Mulpuru says that the dislike button will be the perfect way to vent about a brand. I have to agree with Mulpuru.
Besides the venting, the negativity expressed towards companies, brands and retailers could have an enormous effect on Facebook-based advertisements. Companies pay Facebook for advertisements, but they don’t want to pay for an advertisement when this will cause a tidal wave of dislikes. So if this will be possible when the dislike button is rolled out, companies might start to avoid Facebook when it comes to advertisements. If this is the case, Facebook could lose a lot of money that they used to generate from advertisements.
However, one could look at it in a different way. Companies could use the like button vs the dislike button as an informal poll. This could give retailers a better sense of what customers like and dislike. This way they use the dislike button in their advantage.
I was wondering what you think!? Is Facebook taking a risk with the implementation of the dislike button? Will companies still use Facebook as an advertisement platform? And lastly, would you be interested in a dislike button, or will this only generate negativity?
Sources:
http://time.com/4035551/facebook-dislike-button-zuckerberg/
http://money.cnn.com/2015/09/15/technology/facebook-dislike-button/index.html
I don’t like the dislike button, if it’s actually meant to be dislike, because it’s really a negative sign on social media like FB, andI think on FB we would more likely to share some good things with our friends, even if we share some sorrow, at least I would prefer a like to a dislike, because it’s more like a support for me.
And as for the company or a brand, the ‘dislike’ or something may create more workload for the brand management department, because it’s more obvious for people on Internet to see the company is good or not than the bad comments. And bad news will travell even faster.
And for FB, I think that if it’s true there will be less company to take the risk of posting the advertisement on FB. Although FB can say that people’s attitude may not represent FB, the situation will cost a loss for FB.
But I think their can be more than a ‘like’ or ‘dislike’ button on FB. As far as I’m concerned, in some Chinses social media, they create button with pattern like ‘Flower’ or ‘Heart'( Instagram is also a heart pattern) or ‘A smiling face’ and some other things to express different attitude. But maybe it will be complicated for FB users, and there’s also a problem because for most of the time some of the buttons mean the same.
By the way, his blog reminds about some misunderstanding about the ‘Like’ button in China. I can’t remember the exact issue, but it’s like something bad happened in China and when it was reported by western media a huge amount of people press the ‘Like’ or ‘Thumb up’ button, which then led to some rages among some Chinese because they thought that these buttons meant cheers and those foreigners were not showing sympathy towards what was happening in China.
But later, some voices came out saying that people in western world using the ‘like’ button quite differently as what we do in China, say, they press the Like button to show their support or agreement…
Well, I just somehow thought about this story. There maybe a cultural elements on the using of the button, yet I myself don’t know either how you guys regard the button as exactly, and I’m also wonder to know.
I don’t see the need for a ‘dislike’ button on Facebook. As mentioned above, it can cause a huge sense of negativity. Some people also ‘like’ to show their support and agreement to a sorrow situation. Facebook is a major advertising platform for various companies and introducing the dislike button could cause a huge problem to them. People could start being critical and more number of dislikes could result in brand management issues, thus leading to huge losses for the company. With the dislike button, a company’s promotion strategy might backfire and company’s will decrease the use Facebook as an advertising platform. Large portion of Facebook’s revenue comes from these ads and decline of these could also result in a loss for Facebook. The dislike button could also hurt/decrease a person’s self esteem.
There are various platforms such as Yelp, which allows people to critique, rate and comment upon a company, or brand and thus I don’t see the point of introducing a dislike button on Facebook.
Facebook could maybe create a ‘love’ button instead with a heart sign, which shows the users satisfaction/happiness level towards a particular company/post/picture etc.
I believe that there are already negative effects (such as cyber bullying) connected to these social media platforms and introducing the dislike button might just worsen the situation.
I am really looking forward to this dislike button. I understand the reactions above and to be honest, i prefer a like button above a dislike button as well. But still, i think this will be a nice add-on for facebook. There are so many people giving negative reaction to brands and newsfeeds, and now the only thing you need to do is hit the dislike button, just als you would hit a like button if you like someone’s picture. The only thing that worries me is the fact that people could be afraid to post something because other people could dislike it. Personally, i believe this won’t happen very often because i would be ashamed i was the one disliking someones profile picture and everybody could see that i would be a jerk by doing so. For the companies; look at all the negative reviews (and positive offcourse) on the internet. I think that a little like button won’t hurt that much. On the other hand, nowadays, when a post is liked a lot, it will be shown on a lot of newsfeeds. If this would work the same for dislike buttons, than companies could get in trouble. But still, We live in 2015 and companies should consider not posting something if it could get disliked a lot.