> BlogIf you ever wished that Facebook would just give you the option to ‘like’ something and let certain friends know about it, rather than all of your Facebook friends via your News Feed then they have answered your wish with the ‘send’ button.
The ‘send’ button allows you to share information with your Facebook Groups, Facebook friends or anyone with a standard email address. This allows you to be more selective about whom you want to share particular information with. The message then appears in your friend’s inbox, so only those that you directed it too can see it.
It seems that the ‘send’ button is another step in reinventing email with Facebook messaging as we have blogged about in the past. It will effectively serve a number of purposes:
1. Give users the option to send links/information to just those who they want to
2. Increase the number of users using the Facebook messaging system
3. Increase the amount of external web content coming through Facebook
Either way you look at it Facebook are reeling more and more people in to use their platform.
I have a website do I need the ‘send’ button?
The ‘like’ button has been integrated into many websites already and we can expect in future to see the ‘send’ button accompanying it. Or for those sites wanting to provide just one option, we may possibly see the ‘send’ button by itself.
By providing the ‘send’ button it is more likely that more targeted visits to your website will occur. Let’s say for instance that you run a motel in New Plymouth and you have the ‘send’ button on your website and let’s say that I’m organising accommodation for a group of friends coming to Taranaki for a concert. I come across your website, like what I see and decide to tell my friends about it to get their thoughts, so I click the ‘send’ button, insert the ‘to’ information and off my message goes to my friends. My friends then click through to the link (i.e. your website) have a look around and a decision is made.
Now let’s have that same scenario but instead of clicking the ‘send’ button I click the ‘like’ button. What happens here is that my ‘like’ shows up in my Facebook ‘News Feed’ to all my friends. If it was meant to be directed at my group of friends I’m looking for accommodation for, I’d have to hope that they see it in my news feed OR I’d have to directly email them the link. So from a user point of view it’s another step and the ‘like’ button doesn’t necessarily provide me with what I want to do.
Making the decision about whether to use both buttons or one or the other is up to the goals that you want to achieve. Are you looking for more targeted visits, or are you simply looking for popularity votes? A blog for instance would still benefit from a ‘like’ button but it could also benefit from a ‘send’ button to. This might be a great opportunity to insert the two. If you find that one or the other isn’t working, then you can always remove it at a later stage.
It has been reported too that Facebook are looking to add metrics around their ‘send’ button to their Insights dashboard in the near future.
For developers looking to insert the Facebook Send button on client websites, Facebook have released the codes for this here : http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/plugins/send
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