Facebook Embedded Posts Spread Public Posts Socially

Facebook has launched Embedded Posts, allowing public posts on the social network to be included elsewhere online, just as Twitter, Vine, and Instagram already offer. The new feature, which is currently limited to a select number of company pages, along with individual and "Pages" posts, but will eventually be opened up to any publicly-shared company post, supports hashtags, "read more" splits and the ability to Like the source page directly from the embed.

Currently, only five company pages actually support embedded posts – CNN, Huffington Post, Bleacher Report, PEOPLE, and Mashable – though Facebook says that will change over the near future. The embed option is in a new button in the drop-down menu on publicly-shared posts, and includes the Facebook SDK for JavaScript which also needs to be embedded.

"If you already include this snippet elsewhere on your page, you can remove it if you wish, although it will not cause any issues if included twice" Facebook says of the extra code. However, it could present issues for sites that don't support external JavaScript.

Initially the Facebook embed boxes are a fixed size, and can't be modified. However, they do synchronize with the source post: any Likes are reflected on the original page, though trying to comment will open up the full Facebook site. There's no notification when someone actually embeds a post elsewhere, either.

If the post visibility is changed from public to private, or friends-only, however, the embed will disappear and instead show a message explaining the change.

Spreading Facebook around the internet and across multiple devices has seen a big push in recent weeks, with the site making inroads into mobile gaming, hashtag support, and more. There's also the potential for TV-style adverts, with Facebook reportedly hoping to sell its users' attention to advertisers for as much as $2.5m a day.