Facebook Like button and Facebook recommendations box are quite popular plugins among sites and lot of bloggers implemented them on their blogs. Now Facebook launched a new social plugin “Recommendations Bar” that gives pop-up suggestions to site readers based on their friends likes and shares.
When a reader reads an article, the recommendations bar will pop-out from the bottom right of the screen to give users other recommended articles from the site. This feature is similar to WordPress plugins which offer recommendations, for example SimpleReach Slide. Like the Facebook button, when users like these articles from Recommendations Bar they are posted back to the users timeline. The recommendations are based on user friends activity on that site.
Recommendations Bar launched last year in Beta is now officially announced and available to all sites. Sites like Mashable are already using the plugin. Facebook says they see 3x click through rates when using Recommendations Bar compared to Recommendations Box.
To get started using the Recommendations Bar on your site, check out the documentation. As with any other Facebook social plugin implementing is easy, just grab the code and include in your HTML. If you are already using any Facebook plugins like “Like” button, you can just use this, Otherwise include OpenGraph markup on your HTML. For WordPress users this plugin is included in the recently released Facebook for WordPress plugin.
[Via Facebook]
