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April 12, 2016ByMing Li

Facebook Sharing tools help people easily share and engage with the things that interest them, both on and off Facebook. Now we're introducing new ways for people to share, along with new tools to measure those interactions so you can optimize sharing and increase growth.

New Ways to Share and Engage

Quote Sharing: Makes it easy for people to express themselves by sharing quotes they find in apps and on websites. You can build an experience that lets people share specific quotes from an article, book, etc. or that lets people highlight and share any text that resonates with them. Quote sharing is supported in the share dialog on iOS, Android, and mobile/desktop web. We also offer a button for easily sharing quotes from web pages.

Hashtag Sharing: Lets you include a suggested, removable hashtag in the composer when people share from an app. This makes it easy for people to connect around topics that interest them on Facebook and adds more context to a post. Documentation available here for iOS, Android, and mobile/desktop web.

Optimized Mobile Web Share Dialog: Before, when people clicked a Facebook Share button on a mobile website, the browser opened a new tab. Now, you have the option to open the share dialog in an iframe letting people share seamlessly without leaving the content. This only takes one additional line of code with our JS SDK, or a simple configuration change if you're using the Share button.

Save Button: Brings the popular Save feature on Facebook to sites off Facebook. The Save button helps people save articles, products and videos from all over the web in a private list on Facebook, which they can easily access later from any device. At relevant times, we'll also remind people about their saved things — like when a product goes on sale, or if they've saved an article they haven’t read yet. Check out this video that showcases how it works.

Better Embedded Content: Based on feedback from publishers, we revamped embedded posts with cleaner and more design options, so you can choose the type and size best for your site. For embedded live videos, people will now know that the video is live and see how many people are viewing it. We also launched embedded comments which gives you the ability to embed public comments from Facebook on your site. We're excited that embeds now download 60% fewer bytes and initial rendering is twice as fast.

Sharing for Devices API: Devices including TVs, set-top boxes, digital photo frames, and other Internet of Things devices can now use the Share dialog. This API lets people explicitly share content from devices to Facebook using a new Graph API. Devices submit a link to share to the API which returns a short code to show to people. After entering the code on their mobile device, people are redirected to the web Share dialog to complete the share.

Updated Plugins

Improved Moderation Tools for Comments: Better moderation capabilities for the Comments plugin so it's easier for you to manage conversations and combat spam. Spam fighting features include: a new flagged queue, a new function that automatically closes comments, after a certain date, and partial word matching in the blacklist. We're also opening up our comments mirroring feature, so any developer can choose to implement it.

Tools to Measure and Learn

Sharing Insights: Gives web publishers anonymous, aggregated information about the number of people discussing a particular link on Facebook, the most popular quotes being shared from it, and other trend info. These insights will help you better customize your content for your audience to increase sharing.

Sharing Debugger: Improvements to the Share Debugger make it easier for you to view and manage your links when they get shared across Facebook. For example, we've made errors clearer and more actionable and we've added the ability to manage multiple links at the same time. We will also be making the tool available in 16 languages. You can learn more here.

To learn more about these and other sharing tools, visit our Sharing and Social Plugins pages.