What You Should Know About The New Facebook Send Button
April 26 2011 by Jason Peck ~ 0 CommentsFacebook has rolled out a new Send button, which is a twist on the “email this to a friend” buttons you’re probably used to seeing on blog posts and product pages around the web. The send button lets an individual send a specific URL to a friend, group of friends or to any email address. It’s designed for private sharing (the content appears in the person’s Facebook inbox), unlike the Like button, which lets people publicly share URLs and have them appear on their walls.
This could/probably will end up replacing “email to a friend” buttons, and giving Facebook more control over the online messaging landscape. Also, with what we’ve seen with the search engines using likes as criteria in ranking URLs, search engines could eventually use the number of sends a URL has to determine how influential it is. If you think about it, a send is actually more of an endorsement than a like, so it might have greater weight in search results.
For now, likes will still be the main signals for search engines (as far as I can tell). According to Mashable, “sends count toward the total number of Likes a page has. The Like total will now be calculated by adding the number of likes, shares, comments and inbox messages containing a URL.”
50 websites are launching with the send button; soon, many more are expected to do so. Short term, it may make sense to wait a week or so to see how this is received. Long term, I would expect that it would make sense for you to implement this button on article pages, product pages, etc. If this ends up having an effect on search rankings and website traffic, I bet we’ll see people running campaigns that are geared at getting people to “send” their content to friends by using this button.
Here’s a look at the send button in action.
Here’s more information about the send button from Facebook’s developer site.
What do you think about this new button from Facebook? Will it be as popular as the like button and give Facebook more control over messages that are sent around the Internet?
Image from: DCeventjunkie
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- 6 Great Resources for Learning About the Intersection of Search and Social
- Social Media Sharing Buttons You Need To Know About
- Which Of The Top 100 Internet Retailers Have A Customized Welcome Tab for Facebook?
- How Often Should You Update Your Facebook Page to Gain the Most Likes? Part 2
