Are you going to “Like” the New Facebook “Send” Button
Just when you thought you had it all figured out, Facebook rolls our another major wrinkle to Facebook marketing. The “Send” button.
The Send button is a social plugin that, like the “Like” button, websites can use to let users broadcast information they’re consuming on the web to their friends on Facebook. The “Send” button is different from the “Like” button in that “Send” enables private sharing. Where a user hitting the “Like” button within a website publishes a feed post of this activity to his entire list of friends via his public news feed, hitting “Send” will enable that user to instead choose the exact people he’d like to share the content with. This linked content can be sent via Facebook message, email, or posted right into a specific Facebook Group’s wall. This addition to open graph sharing abilities will enable greater private sharing and more social sharing among groups of friends. Facebook is already calling it “the easiest way to privately share things with groups and individuals.”
Social media marketers will find the “Send” button a promising addition to the sharing functionalities of your brand website. Since visitors will now be able to target their sharing activity to specific people, instead of worrying about blasting their entire Facebook friends list each time they want to “Like” something on your site.
From Facebook:
The Send button is a social plugin that websites can use to let people send a link to a friend through Facebook Messages, post it to a Group, or email it to an individual. For example, if you see a Mother’s Day gift idea on 1-800-Flowers.com, you can now send a message or email to your family members to discuss. Or say you’re training for a marathon and you come across a great article about running shoes on The Huffington Post. Now you can share it with your entire running group in just one click.
The Send button to be used alongside the Like button. By including both on your website, people will have ability to broadcast the things they like and also send it to specific people
Facebook provides code that will enable you to add this feature to your site, however most of us will probably wait for the development of plugins with this feature before we install. If you would like the details on how to install, go to Facebook Developers.
With this new tool, Facebook is competing with other sharing tools such as Sharethis and Addthis. And because it is a Facebook app, I am sure there quickly will be widespread adoption because of the integration to your list of Facebook friends.
