Facebook rolls out Recommendations Bar, claims tripled click-through rates

Looks like Facebook’s taken a leaf out of Twitter’s “search and discovery’s where it’s at” book. The world’s largest social network today announced that it was rolling out a recommendations bar.

The new social plug-in is aimed at helping people find articles based on what their friends like and share from your site.

As a person reads an article, a small pop-up surfaces at the bottom of the screen highlighting recommended articles and prompting them to like the page. Recommendations are based on content that friends have explicitly liked and shared in your app or website.

Facebook says the plug-in functions similarly to its like button. So when a person likes an article using the Recommendations Bar, a story is published back to their timeline and friends’ news feed.

The new feature has already been rolled out on tech news site Mashable, as well as on Wetpaint and on the site for UK newspaper The Mirror.

The social network claims that early tests have seen click-through-rates triple on the stories recommended by the new service.

That’s bound to attract anyone who uses content to drive revenue, but it’ll be interesting to see whether it continues to do so once it’s more widely rolled out.