FutureFive New Zealand - Consumer technology news & reviews from the future
New Chrome extensions for Facebook
Thu, 30th Jun 2016
FYI, this story is more than a year old

Following their slide show update earlier this week, Facebook has great news for Chrome users: You can now save and share things from the web to Facebook with the click of a button.

Updates have also been made to Facebook's like, share, send, follow, recommend, and save buttons that users constantly interact with on website and mobile apps.

New chrome browser buttons:

  • Save to Facebook allows you to easily save interesting things you see around the web for later — whether it's an article to read, a video to watch, a recipe to keep, or a product to buy. People can access the things they save any time, on any device in a private, dedicated bookmark on Facebook. More than 300m people use the save feature on Facebook every month, and they now have another option with Chrome.
  • Share to Facebook helps you share more content to Facebook, Groups and Messenger - while browsing off of Facebook.
  • Both are free, and now available to download in the Chrome web store.

New look for Facebook's Like and Social buttons:

  • The like button received a new look with the thumbs up icon vs. the Facebook “f” logo. Facebook ran qualitative and quantitative tests on two designs, and the thumbs up icon showed a 6% increase in engagement, so the thumbs up icon will replace the like button.
  • Facebook also modernised its entire suite of social buttons with updated icons (share, send, follow, recommend, and save) that better reflect the Facebook brand, and a new design system that works across all Facebook buttons; this includes colour consistency, a flat button design, and like and share counts within the button for a cleaner, more refined visual style.

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. Comments will also be mirrored between Instant Articles and your website if you use the comments plugin.

With two new updates over the last few days, it will be interesting to see if Facebook has anything exciting in store for us next week.