Facebook "Like" and "Share" buttons on a website, which is better?

I was wondering, What's the difference between users "liking" a page and users "sharing" it. For example let's say I have a news website with lots of articles. Should i have a "Like" button on the homepage and a "Share" bu开发者_StackOverflow中文版tton on each individual article? Or maybe the opposite is true?

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Why Facebook recommends using the Like button (beware, sarcasm inside) :

• It gives them more information on users.
• Everything is controlled by them (via iFrame or hosted javascript), which can be nice (widget is updating live !) (control is the key word here)
• It's easy to implement

Why you shouldn't use the Like one anyway :

• Its security is pretty bad (ie : spam, hijacking, user tracking -paranoia addict-, etc.)
• Users may want to like the page (or product, or whatever) but not sharing it on their page.
• It's easy to implement the share button, or even a custom one anyway.

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Facebook doesn't recommend using the Share button, instead using the Like Button. This is what Facebook says about the Like Button.

The Like button lets a user share your content with friends on Facebook. When the user clicks the Like button on your site, a story appears in the user's friends' News Feed with a link back to your website.

More info and tutorial are available from the link above.

Hope this helps.

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an important differentiator is performance;

a share-link does not not make any request to facebook (or any other site) unless clicked, while the like-widget makes requests to facebook (hence the privacy issue Chouchenos rightfully mentions).

this indeed means that a page with the share-link will load faster than the same page with the fb like-widget.