Think before you "Like" on Facebook

The founder and president of New York City's Pace Public Relations is a successful and sober-minded individual, but when it comes to this one thing, she has a definite compulsion. It's the "Like" button on Facebook -- she just can't stop clicking it."I'm totally obsessed with it," says the 31 year old. "Just like a lot of people I know. My friends and I call it 'Like-Bombing', where you go online and like everything."So it's a good thing for serial "Likers" like Scranton that there are more and more rewards for consumers who click that button.Hotel chain Marriott, for instance, is currently offering prizes totaling 10 million reward points for those who Like its Facebook pages, including two grand prizes of a million points each.Think of it as a social-media arms race among corporations, to see which can amass the greatest number of online followers."It's become a real competition between companies to grow the size of that number, and to have more fans than your rivals," says Matt Simpson, marketing director for Phoenix-based Bulbstorm, which develops social-media apps for companies such as NBC and World Wrestling Entertainment."Over the last year, we've been seeing more and more of it, and it's been driven largely by promotional applications like sweepstakes."

PROMOTIONS AND LIST BUILDING

If you "Liked" Toys 'R Us before Thanksgiving, for instance, you got a shot at a limo ride, a $1,000 shopping spree, and exclusive store access before its doors opened for Black Friday sales.Travel site Expedia, meanwhile, hosted a 'FriendTrips' sweepstakes for those who Liked its Facebook page, offering voyages to one of 13 different destinations.As a result, in the third quarter of this year, an average of 100 million "Like" buttons were being clicked on Facebook every day. That's double the amount of liking going on, compared with the same period last year.Corporations are doing this for a reason, of course. They're building marketing lists, they're aiming to boost sales, and they're planting themselves in users' news feeds.When Coca-Cola has more than 36 million Likes, and Disney has more than 29 million, they've assembled a ready-made audience that can be tapped at any time.And here's a little secret: While companies are certainly happy to have you as a fan, what they're really interested in isn't you; it's your friends.Because if you officially Like Starbucks, your friends see that you've liked Starbucks, and they become more likely to spend there as well."Friends of fans represent a much larger set of consumers than the brand's own fans," says Elisabeth Diana, Facebook's manager of corporate communications. "In fact they're 81 times the size of the actual fan base, so Likes are a way to reach those people as well."The promotional pushes seem to be paying off.Expedia's FriendTrips campaign, for instance, garnered 900,000 new Likes for the company. And while Marriott's contest is ongoing until the end of the year, its new Marriott Rewards Facebook page has already gone from zero to more than 170,000 Likes."We've surpassed all other hotel rewards programs in under three weeks," says Michelle Lapierre, Marriott's senior director of customer relationship marketing, taking a slap at rivals Hilton, Starwood and Hyatt.