Do we really 'like' brands?

In a recent article, eMarketer reported that 54% of Facebook users do not want their newsfeeds to be flooded by messages from brands. Are Facebook’s newsfeed options the answer to this?

We can mark stories as ‘important’ and hide all posts by brands. This feature can determine how relationships between brands and fans continue after the coveted first ‘like’. These options are great, and I love that my newsfeed is a bit tidier now, but I’ve started to wonder, if I’m hiding all these brands’ content, why don’t I just ‘unlike’ them?
 
The blog, All Facebook, posted, ‘The 100 Most Engaging Brands On Facebook’ last Monday, noting posts, comments, likes, fans, and active fans as the determining factors on this list. The most interesting thing here was the extreme differences between fans and active fans.  Why do users like pages if they never interact with them?

93% of Facebook users click a page ‘like’ button at least once a month, but only 34% say they like brands in order to stay informed on its activities (via study by ExactTarget & Cotweet). 

I attribute this large gap to great marketing and compelling status updates by brands. How often have you ‘liked’ a brand to participate in a contest, show support for a CSR initiative or because they told you a deal could be found there? That being said, can brands still measure influence in ‘likes’, if more than half their fans never interact with them or hide the brand’s status updates?

Recent Facebook insight updates now put a major focus on engagement rather than fans, noting how many people are talking about a brand and checking in with a geo-location app. Is this Facebook’s way of nudging out the importance of 'likes'?
 
It will be interesting to see, as brands and marketers begin to incorporate these new metrics into their plans, which brands are really engaging all their fans and being talked about the most. 
 
This new type of measurement will be spurring on new types of strategies from major brands to increase engagement, which will no doubt be the subject of future posts on Wolfetracking.