New Ways to Share, Save and Engage
we’re introducing several new ways for developers to help people improve their sharing and saving experience. This includes two new Chrome extensions, as well as updating our full suite of Social Plugin buttons to make it even easier to share, save and engage with content on Facebook.
Modernizing Social Plugin buttons
Social Plugins are one of the easiest ways to integrate Facebook with your website. The Like button is one of our most iconic products with over 10 billion views each day across millions of websites.
The Like and Share buttons both use the Facebook “f” logo today. Our hypothesis was that more people would understand the thumbs up icon on the Like button, so we conducted qualitative and quantitative tests to measure them side-by-side. The results revealed an increase in engagement, so we are switching the Like button from the Facebook “f” logo to the thumbs up icon.
Additionally, new versions of all our Social Plugin buttons are now available with the following improvements:
• Mobile-friendly: The original Like button was designed when mobile was in its early days. Over 30% of Like button impressions come from mobile devices, and we are releasing new button sizes so you can choose the best one for your site on desktop or mobile.
• Cleaner design: We modernized our entire suite of Social Plugin buttons with updated icons that better reflect the Facebook brand and provides a more engaging experience for people. The new design system will work across all our buttons, and includes color consistency, a flat button design, and Like and Share counts within the button for a cleaner, more refined visual style.
• Backwards compatible: The Like and Share buttons are embedded in millions of third-party sites, so we made sure that any changes we made worked with every configuration previously available. In this design process we did exhaustive testing with different languages and in the context of people’s sites to ensure backwards compatibility and scalability.
• Instant Articles integration: In the coming weeks, Instant Articles publishers will be able to add Like, Comment, and Share buttons to the bottom of their Instant Articles, and interactions with these buttons will be included in aggregate Like and Share counts. If you have the Comments Plugin installed on your site, comments on a web article will sync the conversation with its Instant Article equivalent. If you have Comment Mirroring turned on for the Comments Plugin, comments from the article’s post in News Feed will be synced with the web article and the Instant Article, creating a unified thread across all three surfaces.
New Share and Save Chrome Extensions
Sharing and saving great content are two things that people love to do when browsing the web. Improving this experience for people drives greater engagement and distribution of content for sites and keeps visitors coming back for more.
Now we’re making it easier for people to both Share and Save with our new Chrome extensions, Share to Facebook and Save to Facebook.
We want to help people connect with each other through sharing the things that matter to them. Share to Facebook will give people more options to share any link on the web with their friends to Facebook, Groups, and Messenger.
Today, over 300 million people use the Save on Facebook feature every month. We launched the Save button at F8 this year to give people the ability to also save things they discover around the rest of the web, and receive notification reminders to visit their Save list. People can access the things they save any time, on any device in a private, dedicated bookmark on Facebook. The Save to Facebook Chrome extension offers another easy way for people to save articles, videos, products, and other interesting items while browsing the web.
Action required by developers
To add these new Social Plugin buttons, visit our developer documentation. For any site that has already embedded a Like, Share, Send, Follow, Recommend, or Save button, no additional action is needed, and they will automatically get the updated design with no change in size. This update will be a gradual rollout, and people will start to see these changes over the coming weeks.
We believe these new products will provide better experiences for people to engage with the content on your websites.