You know how it’s kind of my job to be on top of all the latest social media advances? Well, I may have failed miserably this time, but hopefully late is better than never.
Facebook, as I have often complained about before, is constantly shifting and morphing and changing. Good on them, I guess–they are trying to make themselves better. The problem is, they are notorious for not telling anyone when they do make a change. You just wake up one day, and things have changed.
It took me quite a while to cotton on to this latest change, and it’s not one that I’m a big fan of.
A while back, Facebook introduced the “Like” button for the web. What this allowed us to do was to install “Like” buttons on our websites and blogs. Whenever someone hit the “Like” button, an update would show up on your personal FB account, saying that you “liked a link” and with a link back to it. Great for marketing and spreading the word, but somewhat limited in its scope.
Next, Facebook introduced the “Share” Button. It added to the useability of the “Like” button by allowing you to make a comment on the link you were liking, making it more personal. Furthermore, you could also share the link (again with a comment) to either a group, a page, or as a private message to one of your friends. I used this feature often to share my blog posts to my Facebook Fan Page (which, if you haven’t “Liked” yet, please do, as I’m 6 away from 500).
The other day, I went to do exactly that, and discovered that my “Share” Button had simply–poof!–disappeared.
I started to do some research, and discovered that Facebook had very quietly taken the “Share” Button out of operation, and replaced it, instead, with the “Send” Button. Are you confused, yet?
The “Send” Button acts a lot like the “Share” Button: you can send the page with one of your Facebook Friends, a Group you belong to, or (and this is new) anyone’s email address. Cool right? Yeah. Except that you can no longer “Send” or “Share” to a page that you administrate.
It appears that Facebook is forcing us to become more personal in our sharing, but I for one, am very frustrated to have lost this particular feature.
Please note: I’m still seeing “Share” around the web, but it’s disappeared from Facebook’s Social Sharing features, and I can’t seem to get it back on my site.
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If you want to enable the “Send” button on your website or blog, you can get the HTML code by going to your Facebook Page, and then clicking on “Edit Page–>Update Info” in your Admin Panel. In the main, left-hand menu, click on the “Resources” tab, then “Use Social Plugins.” You’ll be able to get the code here for both the “Like” and the “Send” buttons.
If you are running a self-hosted WordPress Blog, in your Dashboard, go to “Plugins–>Add New,” and do a search for “Facebook Like and Send.” The one I’m using (which you can see at the top of this post) is here.
Read: What’s Happening to Facebook Like and Share
It is a little buried but there is a Blog in the developers section of facebook that talks about changes like thus in advance. I admit that I really don’t read it so closely but I do remember seeing that the share button was getting axed.
As for the more personal aspect of things I expect it is part of there profit making stuff. They want to make the profile very human centric so that people feel engaged and spend time and money. It is somewhat annoying as a developer. I built sites for clients at work and get updates that sometimes flood my stream. FB wants the profile to be a holistic person without any separation of groups. I miss my seperataion.
Good article though. Send doesn’t sound as good as like or share to me.