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Facebook offers a wide selection of social buttons (plugins) for websites and blogs. Facebook buttons allow the site visitors to join a brand’s Facebook page, share content with friends, comment, and like directly on the website. Facebook buttons can be easily customized and embedded by copying and pasting the code.

Facebook social buttons can be downloaded on the Facebook Developers Social Plugins page.

image: buuteeq

Like Button

Facebook Like button enables site visitors to share the website’s content with their Facebook friends. Every click on the Like button will be displayed on the visitor’s newsfeed with a link to the website.

Facebook recommends websites with pages that represent real life entities such as movies, celebrities or restaurants to display the information using the Open Graph protocol. That way, each visitor’s like will be recorded on his profile’s likes and interests, as if he declared liking the Facebook page.

Send Button

Facebook’s Send button allows site’s visitors to distribute content with their friends, submit it on their Facebook groups walls, or send it in a private messages to selected friends. Websites can create a combined Like and Send button.

Each message sent using the Send button includes a link to the specific webpage with a title, an image and a short description of the content. The settings can be edited using Open Graph Meta Tags.

Image: Business Insider

Follow Button

Formerly known as the Subscribe button, the Follow button allows site’s visitors to track publicly the Facebook page’s updates.

Comments

The comments box allows users to leave identified comments on the website. With this plugin feature webmasters can display comments by relevancy, hide spam comments and distribute the comments to the newsfeed of the commenter’s friends and the website’s followers.

This social plugin has a mobile version that appears every time someone visits the site using a mobile device. The site’s webmasters can turn off the mobile version.

Activity Feed

This plugin displays recent site’s activity such as likes, video watches or any other customized activity defined by the webmaster, as well as activities that used other social plugins such as the comments box. If the site’s visitors are signed in on Facebook, the Activity Feed plugin will display customized content according to their friends’ latest activity on the social network. If the visitors are not signed in or they don’t have any friends’ activity to display, the plugin will display general content recommendations.

Recommendations Box

This plugin displays customized content recommendations to the site’s visitors. Signed in users will get recommendations based on their friends latest activity. Webmasters should define the domains that will be displayed on the Recommendations Box.

Recommendations Bar

The Recommendations Bar is located at the bottom of a webpage and it allows users to respond to the site’s content on any of the commonly used ways (like, share, etc.) When a visitor reaches the bottom of the page, the plugin opens an extended display and suggests reading recommendations to additional webpages.

image: engadget

This plugin requires using the Open Graph Markup to show Facebook how to display the articles or it will display error pages instead of recommendations.

Like Box

The Like Box allows websites that have Facebook pages to get more likes on their websites. It also allows users to see the number of page followers, which of their Facebook friends is following the page, read the latest Facebook updates directly from the website, and obviously like the Facebook page without leaving the website (as opposed to the Like Button, which allows users to like only a certain webpage).

Login Button

The Login Button enables users to sign in to the website using their Facebook login. It also displays the site’s visitors the profile pictures of their Facebook friends who are already signed in to the site. Webmasters can define the number of rows of faces that will be displayed on the site and to adjust the plugin size accordingly.

Registration

The Registration button allows site’s visitors to register to the website via Facebook registration form. The site’s webmasters can add customized fields to the registration form and get additional information. Visitors without a Facebook account or those who prefer not to register with their Facebook account can still sign up using the same registration form.