The New Facebook Viral Bandwagon
It sprang up a few times on my Facebook front page. Someone “likes” some witty statement as seen on “♥”. Erm…what the hell is ♥? Curiously I investigated, and was pretty surprised at what I found.
Since this might not make much sense to most of you, let me give you a visual:
See that little heart on the right? It’s hyperlinked, and it points to a site called LikeMyThought. I started seeing this stuff pop up a few days ago, until the little heart icon caught my eye – knowing that it was a hyperlink, I had to see what it was (mostly because I knew it was something created by some new, aspiring internet marketing genius).
When visiting the site, I was astounded to see that it was nothing but some big Facebook API-driven list of nonsense quotes, mantras and phrases that you could “like” and have appear on your Facebook feed, through Facebook connect. The quotes were ranked by “most liked,” which appeared at the top-most portion of the page.
Check this out: visit the site and hit “refresh.” A new quote appears, and the page’s <title> changes to accommodate it as well. Below it is an AdSense 335×280 ad, and a medium banner at top. That’s it. Gee, I thought AdSense banned content-less, RSS-driven or auto-generated sites? Hmm.
There’s more?!
Well, for whatever reason, I managed to see another one of these quotes appear that one of my friends “like”d. I hovered over the heart…but…it wasn’t that same site. It was another one, named LikeFever.info. It’s basically like LikeMyThought, except it looks less cluttered and fits one column. There’s another one, too…it’s called GoLikeUs.net. Oh, and Likesy, too. Ok – I’m guessing this is some kind of new trend here. How long until we see “Facebook Like Site CMS clones” popping up on marketing for-sale forums everywhere?
Dumb or not, these “like” sites are getting oodles of Facebook traffic. While they don’t seem to be ranking for anything worthwhile according to SEMrush, Alexa.com puts LikeMyThought on their map as it is currently around #87,800, with the lesser visited LikeFever at around 194,000…the latter of which has a nice stalagmite spike on its chart. LikeMyThought even has its own Facebook Page as seen here. Looks like they’re harvesting new visitors through good old social networking, rather than putting out the website and hoping for the best.
Just for the hell of it, I searched Google for “♥”, which wound up throwing back a “Your search did not match any documents” reply. Hmm, so much for the hypothesis that they were attempting to appear on Google page 1 for an ASCII character.
Viral Without A Cause
What’s the point of creating these sites? AdSense clicks? Does anyone even click them? For that matter, what’s the motivation of spending more than a few seconds on these sites? The worthiness of any site to get massive Facebook love is obvious, but what’s the resolve – a couple AdSense blocks that can’t possibly be paying more than a penny or two per click? The sites themselves don’t have any backlinks – I’ve counted around 30. However, they must have oodles of Facebook backlinks.
Just like all of the other fads in the past including Hot Or Not, Million Dollar Homepage & others, this has the potential of being a new contender in the quest to copy (and hopefully improve) on a popular new concept. Where it goes, however, is yet to be seen.
As for me, I’ll click the “unlike” icon next to this one (if it actually existed).
Tags: facebook, facebook like, going viral
Hey PixelRage, it’s again me. Would Youtube do something about the tradmarked username if it’s an active user and not a innactive account? Is it worth sending it then?
How do you UNLIKE this stupid page? I clicked Like on a friend’s quote and now it shows up in my Likes and Interests and I want to get rid of it. GRRRR
@Dawn
WTF!? This page is not stupid
Stupid page…
Indeed!
Not sure, I never bothered to “like” those heart pages. I see them more and more, though!
@Dawn: To remove the so-called “social plug-ins” you have to do the following:
Go to the “Info” tab of your profile.
Click edit next to “Likes and interests”
Click “Show other pages” and the spam quotes will appear.
Click remove page.
Click save.
Many Bothans died to bring you this information. Facebook sure didn’t make it easy.
Thank you so much for your time / investigation / explanation. I hate those hearts!
Many of the comments beside them are just rude! Teens love these and seem to spend hours each day doing this???? Perhaps they need a part-time job – they dont seem to have anything better to do.
Have never liked any of those and glad I didnt.
Stephanie, that’s exactly it! A friend of mine makes it a hobby of creating these stupid pages for topics that target teens. They go ridiculously viral in very short amounts of time. It’s kind of an interesting case study.
Buzz lightyear that didn’t work for me. There seems to be no way to remove page. I have reported it to Facebook
To Buzz Lightyear…THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU. I’ve looked several times for a solution to this and never got any hits.
Somebody should find a solution to this? It just doesn’t have an unlike button, and stuck there
Buzz Lightyear
that’s for those playing by the rules, but what about
golikeus.net
mclike.com
@Buzz Lightyear , thanks bro. good work.
THANK YOU BuzzLightyear…………………………………………………..Been looking for a while to figure this out. You made it look easy, lol.
Go to “Edit Profile” then to “Likes and Interests” then under “Activities” (or one of the other catagories), you will see “See one more (1)” click this then highlite whatever it shows then you will finally see a a tiny “remove” on the right under the page you want to remove, (If you are able to highlight but do not see the “remove” you can just hit delete)……Then save
Here’s how you can remove the golikeus.net pages:
1. Go to your Info tab for your profile
2. Click the Edit pencil next to Likes and Interests
3. Under Activities, click the See more link
4. You should see the golikeus.net page. Select it then click Remove to the right.
5. Click Save Changes
Thank you Buzz!!
I followed the instructions…it was not on my “see more links”…but I noticed under “Activities” it was noted in a quote that was highlighted…when I clicked on the quote I noticed a “Remove” button popped up to the left of the page under the Icon…so I hit and it is gone for good!!! Yeah!!!!!!!