In Digg withdrawal? A new Facebook feature, the recommendations bar, provides a similarly social experience. The tool shows you stories from around the Internet based on what your friends are reading.
The feature is now live, so there’s a good chance you’ve noticed it on your Facebook page. As Jeffrey Spehar writes for the Facebook Developers blog, “As a person reads an article, a small pop-up surfaces at the bottom of the screen highlighting recommended articles and prompting them to like the page. Recommendations are based on content that friends have explicitly liked and shared in your app or website.”
The recommendations bar works similarly to the Like button. Once you read a story that’s featured on the recommendations bar, that activity will publish back to your Timeline and news feed.
In addition to using the recommendations bar on Facebook, you can add a plug-in to your website that will automatically feed your site’s content to the recommended pool of articles.
If you have a WordPress site, this feature is included as part of the Facebook for WordPress plug-in. For other sites, Facebook advises developers to configure the plug-in, copy the code and paste it on your site.
Sure, Facebook annoys us from time to time. But you’ve got to give them a hand for continuing to create tools that make it easier and more intuitive to share your content with a larger audience.
And early research shows the recommendations bar is an effective tool when it comes to boosting content click-through rates. According to the Facebook Developers blog, Mashable, Wetpaint and The Mirror have already implemented the recommendations bar and have seen three times the click-through on recommended stories.
Have you added the recommendations bar to your site? Any change in your content’s click-through rate so far?
Image via The Telegraph
