All that Businesses Need to Know about the New Facebook “Send” Button

Facebook has announced the release of a new open graph tool, the “Send” button, which joins the “Like” button as a social utility across the web. Right on the heels of the 1 year anniversary of the “Like” button, which has been integrated into over 2.5 million websites to date, the “Send” button will enable sharing content from the web with specific sets of people.

What is the “Send” button?

The Send button is a social plugin that, like the “Like” button, websites can use to let users broadcast information they’re consuming on the web to their friends on Facebook. The “Send” button is different from the “Like” button in that “Send” enables private sharing. Where a user hitting the “Like” button within a website publishes a feed post of this activity to his entire list of friends via his public newsfeed, hitting “Send” will enable that user to instead choose the exact people he’d like to share the content with. This linked content can be sent via Facebook message, email, or posted right into a specific Facebook Group’s wall. This addition to open graph sharing abilities will enable greater private sharing and more social sharing among groups of friends. Facebook is already calling it “the easiest way to privately share things with groups and individuals.”

From Facebook:

The Send button is a social plugin that websites can use to let people send a link to a friend through Facebook Messages, post it to a Group, or email it to an individual. For example, if you see a Mother’s Day gift idea on 1-800-Flowers.com, you can now send a message or email to your family members to discuss. Or say you’re training for a marathon and you come across a great article about running shoes on The Huffington Post. Now you can share it with your entire running group in just one click.

How can Brands Use the “Send” Button?

We think that social media marketers will find the “Send” button a promising addition to the sharing functionalities of your brand website. Since visitors will now be able to target their sharing activity to specific people, instead of worrying about blasting their entire Facebook friends list each time they want to “Like” something on your site.

For our Wildfire social media software customers, we think this can be an especially handy function for promotions, deals, discounts, and sales that are run.  For example, if you’re running a group giveaway sweepstakes, where a group of 5 friends can enter to win an all-expenses-paid Spring Break getaway, the “Send” button can serve as a quick and easy way for visitors to invite the specific group of friends they need to rally to register to your promotion without worrying about attracting too much competition to the promotion if they posted it publicly to their newsfeed. The “Send” button also allows for greater targeting for the user. Where before the user may not have considered “Liking” a quiz about engagement rings from a jeweler’s website for fear of the impression it would create on her public newsfeed, she will be more likely to “Send” the amusing quiz to her close group of girlfriends instead.

Another important detail, from a Mashable post, is that the “Send” counts toward the total number of Likes a page has. The Like total is now calculated by adding the number of Likes, shares, comments and inbox messages containing a URL.

How will Wildfire integrate the new “Send” button?

Wildfire will be integrating the new “Send” button as a standard sharing feature in promotions powered by our platform. Then, users entering your sweepstakes, contests, group deals (and all our apps) will be able to share these promotions easily with their friends, with one click of the “Send” button without leaving your brand’s promotion page.

Facebook is launching the “Send” button on 50 sites today, and promises to provide an easy way to share with small groups of people, giving marketers and business owners a new way to generate engagement and drive traffic to their websites.