Facebook just launched a new social plugin called the “send” button. Like the “like” button before it, the plugin has the potential to drive traffic to content. The difference is that where the “like” button is for people to publicly share something with their friends, the “send” button is more for personal sharing. You can send something directly to a single person or to a specific group of people.
“We designed the Send button to be used alongside the Like button,” says 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.”
“The Send button drives traffic by letting users send a link and a short message to the people that would be most interested,” he says. “They don’t need to leave the web page they’re on or fill out a long, annoying form. Compared to the alternatives, the Send button has fewer required steps, and it removes the need to look up email addresses by auto-suggesting friends and Groups.”
Publishers, marketers, and site-owners will no doubt rush to get this on their sites, and why not? It has the potential to be clicked as much as the like button, if not more so, if you ask me.
I know I’ve certainly been in the position plenty of times when I came across a piece of content and wanted to share it directly with a specific person. There are tools out there that allow you to do that already, but this will make it much easier and encourage this type of activity.
The traffic it drives should be highly targeted. You’re going to send something to a specific person when you feel that that contents specifically relevant to that person. Presumably this is someone you know fairly well. That’s much better targeting that clicking a like button and hoping someone in your circle of friends cares whether or not you like it.
This button will be a hit.
By the way, Facebook says it will be adding send button metrics to the Insights dashboard in the coming days. So there’s that too.
