Third party buttons – which we’ll talk about later – don’t change or skin the Facebook button itself, they create something new calling to the Facebook API. No, I’m essentially just including option one here for the sake of completion, and to illustrate that it’s difficult to manipulate the button at all. All you can do is scale it up or down, and even that can be tricky to pull off. You can’t eliminate white space, you can’t stretch horizontally or vertically, you can’t change colors or functionality. It allows you to essentially customize the size of the button, but you can’t do anything fancier. I don’t have an example of this on hand for you, and frankly, it’s not that useful of a hack. For example, one hack I’ve seen around is to scale up the size of the button by increasing the size of the div through some CSS code. You can’t manipulate the button, but you can manipulate the context. The exception is some very simple hacks that can apply, not to the button itself, but to the div it’s embedded in. You can’t simply go in and replace a file with a red one to make a red Facebook button. The share count is just one element, but even the button itself, the graphical image of the button, is called by a script in the Facebook SDK. The problem is that you’re not embedding a button on your page, you’re embedding a script that calls Facebook itself for all of the information. You can see the problem on the link to the official button documentation page above, if you have enough knowledge of code to understand it. The Facebook official button is a really tricky one to manipulate. Option 4: Social Sharing Suites Option 1: CSS Hacks So how can you customize the Facebook like button to better suit your needs? You often want those buttons to at least match each other, if not the design of your site as a whole, but Facebook limits those options. The problem with this is not the limitations on the button itself, it’s that the button doesn’t match, in style or design, the other buttons you might be using on your site. You don’t even get colored themes to attempt to match your site. You have very few options for customizing it, just two size options, whether or not you want to include the share button, the addition of a small like box, and that’s basically it. Sure, it’s small and unobtrustive, but it’s also fixed in style and design. They’re trying to get more people to use the official button, but there’s a problem it just isn’t very stylish. Facebook recently made a change that forces you to use their official button if you want the official API-driven share counts for your posts on a site.
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