Sure, your site has like buttons, tweet buttons, email buttons… and now there’s a new button from Facebook called the “Send” button. In essence, it lets you send a story via a Facebook message to the friend(s) of your choice. Here’s a screen grab of it in action:
“We designed the Send button to be used alongside the Like button,” explains Facebook’s Abe Parvand. “By including both on your website, people will have ability to broadcast the things they like and also send it to specific people.”
Facebook says the Send button is much easier than an “email this story” button because it pre-populates with your Facebook friends — no need to remember email addresses. And with that lower barrier, “the Send button drives traffic by letting users send a link and a short message to the people that would be most interested,” Parvand explains.
We added the Send button here on Lost Remote, so click it to give it a try. Just add the “send=true” attribute on your Like button and Send will appear next to it (only works for FBML versions, not the iFrame). Or grab the code from the integrated Like+Send social plug-in page. Smart for Facebook to tie the two together to increase distribution.
Is it worth the real estate? Hard to tell, but it’s certainly worth the experiment to see what happens. Facebook says it will add the “ref” parameter to the plugin “in the coming weeks,” which will make referrals from Send actions trackable on Facebook Insights.
Update: The Washington Post has added the buttons