The new Facebook Send button is yet another way that Facebook lets you spread content to your friends and connections. While the Share and Like buttons notify all your friends about content that you like or recommend, the Facebook Send button allows you to be much more targeted with your endorsements.
The Facebook Send button lets you forward a link to a specific Facebook friend or friends, to Facebook Groups and/or to one or more email addresses. You can Send content to any or all of these three categories simultaneously.
If you click on the Send button at the top of this post, you’ll see the available options (don’t worry – you’re not committed to actually Sending to your friends until you click the Send button within the dialog box). Of course, you need to be logged into Facebook on same browser as the content you’re viewing in order for the connection to Facebook to be active.
Adding the Facebook Send Button to Your Own Content
In terms of adding the Facebook Send button to your own content sites and Pages, this can be very easy, or somewhat tricky, depending on where you’re adding it.
To add a Facebook Send button to one of your iFrame Page tabs or as a static link within any Web page, all you need to do is drop code some simple code into your Page tab’s HTML. You can also generate the code on the Facebook Send button documentation page. In the following example, I’ve added some explanatory text for visitors, since many may not yet be familiar with the button.
<scriptsrc="http://connect.facebook.net/en_US/all.js#xfbml=1"></script><fb:sendhref="facebook.com/YOUR-FACEBOOK-PAGE" font="lucida grande"></fb:send> Send this Page to a friend, a group or an email address.
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If you’re using WordPress.org for your blog, it’s easy to add the button to your posts.
There are a number of blog posts that explain how to add the Send button to WordPress. Note that you’ll need to create an application within Facebook. Several posts on the topic recommend not using a plugin and manually adding the code instead.
While this approach is simple, the downside is that you cannot control the image that is grabbed from your post or page.
Controlling the Image in the Facebook Send Button Dialog
This is where it gets trickier. In order to control the image in the Facebook Send button dialog, you need to enable your Web site for Facebook’s Open Graph meta tag protocol. Depending upon how technical you are, this may require the assistance of a WordPress developer. Here’s a good post on how to add Open Graph code to your WordPress.org blog.
The first image in your post will be the image associated with the Send button. Within the Open Graph protocol code, you can specify a default image if one is not found in your post.
If you are not using a WordPress site, this Facebook Developers document provides the information you need to add the protocol to your site.
While the Facebook Send button is new and the jury is still out as to what degree it will be embraced compared to the Share and Like buttons, there will undoubtedly be a heavy proliferation of this button on Websites over the coming months.
