The Send Button, Because Sometimes It’s Private

Just over one year ago, we introduced the Like button to help people share worthwhile things with all their friends. But there are many times when people want to share something with just certain people. So today, we're introducing the Send button, the easiest way to privately share things with groups and individuals.

How It Works
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.

The Send button drives traffic by letting users send a link and a short message to the people that would be most interested. 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.

We designed the Send button to be used alongside the Like button. By including both on your website, people will have ability to broadcast the things they like and also send it to specific people.

How to Add the Send Button
The Send button can be easily added to existing Like buttons or as a standalone feature. Developers currently using the XFBML Like button can include the send="true" attribute in their Like button code to generate a combined button, and those using an iFrame version of the Like button will need to upgrade to XFBML to display a Send button. The following code will generate a combined Like and Send button:

<div id="fb-root"></div>
<script src="http://connect.facebook.net/en_US/all.js#xfbml=1"></script>
<fb:like href="example.com" show_faces="true" width="450" send="true">
</fb:like>

Developers can add a standalone Send button with the following code:

<div id="fb-root"></div>
<script src="http://connect.facebook.net/en_US/all.js#xfbml=1"></script>
<fb:send href="example.com"></fb:send>

Learn more about adding a combined Like and Send button or just the Send button. Also, we strongly recommend using Open Graph meta tags on your web pages to control the title, description and image displayed when people use the Send button.

Real-time Metrics
In the coming days, we will provide real-time metrics for the Send button in the Insights Dashboard. Once you claim your domain, you will be able to access the number of Send button impressions, messages, and referral clicks sent to your site.

We launched the Like button a little over one year ago, and it is already on millions of sites across the web. The Send button is launching on 50 sites today, and we look forward to seeing the list grow in the coming weeks. We're excited to offer people an easy way to share with small groups of people and give developers a new way to generate engagement and drive traffic to their websites.

Abe, an engineer on Facebook Platform, is sending this to his mom and all his friends.