What’s the difference between Liking and Sharing content on Facebook and which should you use? Customers ask us this question often, so we wanted to discuss it in the context of email marketing and sending newsletters.

In days gone by, Liking something on Facebook was a big commitment because it meant you were becoming a Fan of a particular person or product. Sharing was less of a pledge of allegiance because it enabled you to endorse content without becoming a Fan. In recent months though, that paradigm has flipped.

Facebook unveiled a number of significant alterations to their platform at the f8 conference in April 2010. Some of the most notable announcements were the Open Graph Protocol and social plugins. With these two changes, Facebook decreased the barriers to entry for integrating social functionality with your site or email campaigns, essentially making it a plug-and-play process.

Read More

We’ve added a new merge tag in MailChimp that lets you insert Facebook’s like button in your campaigns: *|FACEBOOK:LIKE|*

The Like button has two functions: 1) it enables users to make connections to your page, and, as we’ve implemented it here, 2) to share content back to their friends on Facebook with one click.

Once you add it to your campaign, the button looks like this:

Read More

According to this article, nearly 65 million Facebook users “Like” things every day.

After Facebook turned that old “Become a fan” button into a simple “Like” button, then made it a social plugin that anybody could install on their website, well — everybody started installing it on their websites (and here’s a nice explanation for that). Christopher Heine reports on Clickz how this change from “fan” to “like” has helped at least one industry double or triple their fan base.

If you’re thinking “Sigh, whatever. I’ve already got the social sharing widgets plastered all over everything I do” that’s a great start. But this is different. Facebook is using all this Like activity to power their own semantic search engine, which some say should make Google worried (actually, they’re trying to say it’s an all out war). Did you get that? Facebook’s building a semantic search engine powered by Likes. If you’re not already thinking about adding that “Like” button to your website, blog posts, or email campaigns, you should be. This reminds me of the early days of web design, where everyone got an SEO for Dummies book, because we all wanted our websites ready for Google. Is your website ready for Facebook? Your blog? How about your emails?

In MailChimp v5.2, which is launching early next week, we’ll be introducing a new merge tag that integrates the Facebook Like button into your email campaigns (no iframe code to worry about breaking). You’ll plop in a simple merge tag, and it’ll just work. We’ll also track how many “Likes” your campaign got inside your MailChimp stats. Here’s a sneak-peek video. Stay tuned for more news about the launch, and all our other upcoming features.