Facebook Gets a "Send" Button: A More Targeted "Like"

Facebook today announced a number of new features for Facebook Groups. Group admins, for example, can now pre-approve members and Groups now also feature a Q&A and photo-sharing section. More importantly, though, Facebook also introduced a new new button that publishers can put on their site: the Send button. This button is a close relative to the Like button, but with the added twist that it allows users to selectively share a webpage with one or more of their Facebook Groups or use Facebook messaging to email it to their friends.

According to Facebook, the Send button is meant to be used alongside the traditional Like button. Facebook partnered with sites like the 1-800-Flowers.com and the Huffington Post to launch this new feature, but if you’re currently using a Like button on your site, you can easily add a Send button by just adding send =”true” to the Like button code. You can also create the code for a stand-alone button here.

If you want to give the Send button a try, you can find one right underneath the Facebook logo at the top of this post.

Private Sharing on Facebook

The Send button is a natural evolution of the Like button. Given the public nature of Like (it’s posted to your wall for everybody to see), adding the ability to share content more selectively only makes sense for Facebook. Given that Facebook now hosts over 50 million groups, it’s clear that users want more selective ways of talking to their friends, so making it easier to also allow them to easily share content more selectively fits right in there. Most users now have a very diverse set of friends on Facebook and quite a lot of content they want to share is likely not of interest to all of their friends.