Facebook Will No Longer Support Their Share Button

Yes it is true today July 17, 2012 Facebook will no longer offer a SHARE button track your FB shares in real time which people can put on their website.

Facebook sharing is a huge way to generate traffic to your website and form awhile now there were 2 options of allow your visitors to share your content on Facebook with there friends. One way was putting a Facebook SHARE button on your site that when pressed would pop up a window that let’s you either post to your timeline or send as a private message to one of your friends. The 2nd way was to have a LIKE/RECOMMEND button on your site and when a visitor clicked on it, a action would be generated on their timeline and news feed of their friends showing they LIKE/RECOMMEND the page.

Now lets talk about the down sides of no more Facebook SHARE button.

• The SHARE button let you change the title and description.
  The LIKE/RECOMMEND button does not and takes the title of the page and some text of the page to display on Facebook.  There are some ways to set what you want to use for this but require some more advanced understand of how your website works.
• The SHARE button let you select the image that was shared with the post.
  The LIKE/RECOMMEND button does not allow for image selection and in some case has an odd way of picking the image.  It is not always the 1st one in the content.  Just like I said earlier about the picking the title and description, there are some ways to set the image you want shared.

My take on it is that Facebook wants to keep it real and that is exactly what the LIKE/RECOMMEND button does because the visitor will not be allowed to change what is shared.

What is your take on this?