Sharing interesting content on Facebook has become one of the primary functions of the social media platform and now the developers are making it even easier to share content. At the F8 developer conference on Tuesday, the social network announced a tool that will make sharing quoted texts easier than ever.
The new “Save To Facebook” button eliminates the need to copy and paste a quote from one platform to another; the button lets you highlight the words you choose and click a button to share. The highlighted content will appear on the News Feed as a block quote and will link back to the original source. Users will still be able to add a comment to the quoted text.
“The Save Button lets people save interesting articles, products, videos, and more from around the web into their Saved folder on Facebook, where they can easily access it later from any device,” reads Facebook’s description of their new tool. “You can build an experience that lets people share specific quotes from an article, book, etc. or that lets people highlight and share any text that resonates with them.”
The “Save To Facebook” button has been available to users on their News Feed for the past four years — users can save content from their feed for consumption at a later time — and Facebook claims that nearly 250 million people use the feature each month. Now, this feature, which is reminiscent of Pocket and Instapaper, has been rolled out to work on any content consumption platform. Unlike Pocket and Instapaper, Facebook will not be removing ads or modifying formatting.
“We’re helping people get back to content on the web but wanted to consume later, whether it was because of bandwidth or time,” said Eddie O’Neil, product manager at Facebook, to International Business Times before the F8 conference.
Facebook now allows all developers to include a “Save to Facebook” button. This tool will be supported in the share dialog on iOS, Android, and the mobile/desktop web.
