Following years of requests, the day has finally come: Facebook is releasing a dislike button.
Yesterday in a Facebook town hall, a streamed question and answer session with the Facebook brass, Mark Zuckerberg announced that the dislike button was on its way, saying, "I think people have asked about the dislike button for many years.” He went on to note that “today is a special day because today is the day I can say we’re working on it and shipping it.”
So what does this mean for your social media use and for the social media strategy of your brand? Well, it means that things are about to get a litte more honest and probably a lot more real. The general consensus on social participation with brands has always been that just as in real life, negativity is more often unloaded than positivity. Facebook had long been considered a safe space for "social media for business" because it oozed positivity by only offering the ability to like. Does it really matter if people do or don't like your content?
Commenting has long been accountable to the like and dislike, as have mediums like Youtube. It is an exciting day for the cnosumer contingent who are surely about to benefit from more thoughtful content creation and more compelling ideas and concepts to be included in social posting moving forward.
So what do you think? Have we upped the game or have we made Facebook a less attractive place to do business?