Recently Facebook has announced that it will be releasing a Recommendations Bar to help suggest content to you based on what your friends are reading. When you are reading an article on a site that works with the Recommendation Bar, a small popup window will show up at the bottom of your screen, recommending articles based on what your friends have read.
Similar to how the Like button works, if you like an article using the Recommendation Bar, a post will be published to your timeline and appear in your friends’ news feed. For readers, this means more relevant and interest stories to read, as they are essentially being curated by your friends.
Facebook says that during early testing, sites had a click through rate of three times more on stories that were recommended by the Recommendations Bar. Sites that are interested in integrating this feature can add with a few lines of code or as part of the Facebook for WordPress plug-in.
For those that are worried about privacy, it is good to know that sites that have the Recommendations Bar option will not share any article just because you read it. You will actually have to click it in the Recommendations Bar in order for it to be shared with your friends, so there’s no need to worry that the guilty pleasure articles you read will end up there.
For Facebook, the new Recommendations Bar is just another way to deepen users’ reliance on the site to stay connected, even when they aren’t on Facebook.