Facebook has just announced a nifty new social plugin tool that makes it easier for people to share your website content with their friends and connections.
It’s called the Send button and you’ll soon see it located right next to the Like button at the top of webpages or blog posts.
It’s similar to the Like button that we’ve all become used to seeing on blog posts and web pages. The Like button has allowed you to share web content with your friends by posting the link to the web content page on your Facebook wall as a public broadcast.
So what’s different about the Send button?
The new Send button allows private sharing of web content. It will allow you (and your readers) to share web content directly with your friends and online connections via email. Or you can also share web content with any of your Facebook groups.
This means that instead of relying on your friends to check their Facebook wall feed or your Facebook page – you can now send the web content directly to their inbox (either Facebook inbox or email inbox) where it is more likely to be seen!
And do you ever have content you want to share but feel hesitant to post it publicly on your Facebook page because you are worried what kind of impression it will make with people that don’t know you well?
Now with the share button you will be able to privately send these notifications out to only your close friends without worrying what kind of impression it will make posted on your Facebook wall.
From the Facebook developers site here is an explanation of how the new Send button will work:
“The Send Button allows your users to easily send your content to their friends. People will have the option to send your URL in an inbox message to their Facebook friends, to the group wall of any Facebook group they are a member of, and as an email to any email address. While the Like Button allows users to share your content with all of their friends, the Send Button allows them to send a private message to just a few friends.”
This is great news!
We now have another easy way for our users to share our content with small groups of people and it gives us a new way to generate engagement and drive traffic to our websites.
The Send button will also count toward the total number of Likes your Facebook page has. The Like total for your page is now calculated by adding the number of Likes, shares, comments and inbox messages containing a URL.
Adding The Send Button To Your Pages
If you want to add the Send button to your website pages (non-Wordpress), visit the Facebook Developer page to generate the code.
For those using WordPress, here is the code to add to your theme file (NOTE: This code should replace your current LIKE button as it includes both the LIKE and SEND ability. It’s the exact code we are using on this site).
<div id="fb-root"></div> <script src="http://connect.facebook.net/en_US/all.js#xfbml=1"></script> <fb:like href="<?php echo get_permalink(); ?>" show_faces="true" width="450" send="true"> </fb:like> |
Try It Here on Our Pages At The Top of The Posts
So try it out now right here on this post – just hit the Send button located right next to the Like button up top and try sending this post to a few of your friends to let them know about this new social plugin tool!
