Yammer today launched a share button, which as its name implies, works just like all the other social buttons. If you want to implement the button on your own site, instructions along with the embed code are available on the Yammer Developer Center.
For those who have never heard of it, Yammer is a freemium enterprise social networking service that launched in September 2008. Microsoft acquired the company in June 2012 and incorporated it into its Office division.
The Yammer Share Button lets you post Web content directly to your network. You can select specific groups or co-workers to share with and include in the conversation.
The button is already integrated into Yammer's Customer Success Center and blog, and it's also being used to make content such as PDF guides more shareable. The Microsoft-owned company promises to add the button into more Yammer sites, hoping that Yammer tips, tricks, and best practices make it into more business networks.
In short, employees now have an even easier way to share content on company time. Facebook or Twitter blocked at work? Don't worry, Yammer's share button probably isn't.
With Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Reddit, and so on providing one or even multiple buttons, we definitely have an overload of social integration on the Web. It's a tight balance for sites to decide whether they want to add more buttons: On the one hand, doing so can slow down the performance of their pages, but on the other hand, not doing so may mean missing out on potential traffic.
Unless your content caters exclusively to a business audience, most site administrators can probably skip the Yammer Share Button. Yet we're not surprised Microsoft had it developed: It could be worth the hassle even if it boosts usage a little.