For many content marketing and/or social media PR strategies, the concept of ‘sharing’ is pretty important. And ‘sharing buttons’ are a great way to enable site or blog visitors to distribute content to their likeminded friends or followers on social networks.

These are nothing new of course, with ‘tweet’ and ‘like’ buttons being included on most sites these days. Back in June, Google launched a +1 button, initially just on search ranking pages, but soon it opened this feature up so that brands and publishers could include +1 buttons on their websites too.

With the launch of Google+ I’d assumed that these +1 buttons would then automatically post +1ed content on your Google+ profile. And they did, but only in a separate ‘+1’ tab, not on your main content stream. Until yesterday that is when Google announced additional sharing functionality for +1 buttons:

“Clicking the +1 button is a great way to highlight content for others when they search on Google. But sometimes you want to start a conversation right away—at least with certain groups of friends. So beginning today, we’re making it easy for Google+ users to share webpages with their circles, directly from the +1 button.”

Google has also revealed that take-up of +1 buttons has been pretty enthusiastic with over a million sites including them and with 4 billion daily views.

The new functionality should work automatically if you’ve got +1 buttons already installed (try ours above!) on your site or blog. But it’s interesting to note that the buttons on search ranking pages don’t currently have the new sharing features; hopefully this will come in time…