Whether social media network users will like it or not, the famous "Like" and "Share" buttons of Facebook have received a makeover. The company announced the big changes Wednesday as it dropped the "thumbs up" icon since it first appeared in 2010. The new look gives the two buttons a more uniform look using the company's familiar "f" logo inside a rectangle on a blue and white format.
The Like and Share buttons of the social network are among the most viewed items on the Internet, seen 22 billion times on a daily basis and plopped on over 7.5 million websites as disclosed by Facebook.
Visitors on websites can click the Like button to post the content on Facebook while the Share button will give users of the social network more options where to share the content or add their own comment.
"Today, we're introducing a new design for both Like and Share to help people share more great content across the web. We're already seeing a favorable increase in Likes and Shares with the new design and will be rolling these buttons out to everyone in the coming weeks," said Facebook software engineer Ray He on the company's developer blog.
If you are currently using the old Like button, you'll be automatically upgraded to the new design as part of our roll out," He added.
The social network encourages website owners to use both the Like and Share buttons to help drive traffic from the network.
The Huffington Post was among the first websites to make use of the new buttons. The media outlet shared how it utilizes the Facebook buttons.
"We place the Like and Share buttons right below the headline of our articles and in a persistent left side bar that stays with the user when they scroll down the page. We want to give people every opportunity to like and share content, and, at this point, I like to think we've made it hard not to engage in social actions," said Head of Product at The Huffington Post, Nico Pitney.
A recent study by Shareaholic found out that Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest account for over 15 percent of traffic for over 200,000 publishers with accumulated reach of 250 million unique visitors every month. The traffic referrals from each of the top social networks grew by 54 percent in terms of overall visits. Facebook's year in year out share of visits growth for September was pegged at 58.81 percent.
