Earlier this month TC writer MG Siegler wrote a post called The Speed of Share, where he noted that sharing content to Facebook wasn’t as good an experience as it was for many of the various Twitter services like Tweetmeme. Today, that balance changes a bit: Facebook has just launched a new version of Facebook Share, which includes such niceties as a live counter that tells you how many times an item has been shared. We’ve just rolled it out to TechCrunch as well. Try it out above!
Along with the improved look of the Share Button, Facebook Share now offers publishers detailed analytics, allowing you to see how many times a link has been shared, as well as actions that occur on Facebook itself, like the number of comments and Likes it’s received as well as the number of times people have clicked on the link back to your site.
Apparently some of this data was already available to select partners, too: Facebook’s blog post notes that Techmeme has been using it to help select top stories, and link shorteners bit.ly and awe.sm for improved analytics.
You can find Facebook’s blog post, which includes details on implementing the new widget, here.