There's a very conclusive report over at TypePad about the benefits of adding Facebook's 'Like' button to your web site. In short, it boosts traffic from Facebook by around 50%, which is not at all bad considering how easy it is to integrate into your design (check this instruction video at Social Networking Weblog to learn how).
The results are derived from an experiment in which roughly 1,500 TypePad bloggers installed the button (launched by FB last April) on their blogs and then recorded the ensuing boost in traffic. Full graphical data of the results can be found at either TypePad or Mashable.
Whatsmore, once TypePad added the like button as a post footer, bloggers saw a 200% boost in referrals from Facebook, which is the kind of result that is pretty foolish to ignore. Of course, Facebook also wins immensely in all this as people now begin to think of themselves as Facebook users even when not directly on the actual site itself. In other words, Facebook is increasingly cross-linked with the web as whole and this can only be a good thing from their point of view.
To summarise then: there is nothing overly complex here (not to say Facebook's button isn't clever though). The like button can boost traffic massively, as TypePad's experiment has shown - especially if added as a blog post footer. Meanwhile, for Facebook, the button is part of an overall strategy to connect the network's previously sealed-off world to the rest of the web, meaning that eventually the social network could become a portal through which all other web surfing happens: i.e. in the course of doing all the other things we do on the web (aside from being on facebook.com) we will also be inputting and interacting simultaneously with our FB networks. Now that's pretty clever...
Dejan Levi
