Share Monitoring Like and Recommendations
Tuesday, May 25th, 2010
Now that you understand how to add the Facebook likes and shares to your site it’s time to start understanding how to leverage these to get cursory metrics and improve the user experience. Facebook provides two tools for you and your visitors to looking at what’s happening on your site right now.
Recommendations Widget
This uses Facebook’s news feed algorithm to help elevate the most interesting content for your visitors. The experience is personalized for each user. However, on smaller sites such as this one, the recommendations are going to be your most valuable content and you can use it to see what is resonating with your audience. The Facebook algorithm selects content based on the number of recent likes and shares and elevates that to the top.
You’ll notice while working with the Facebook configuration tool, that you only need to provide your domain name. There is however a gotcha, if you have multiple sub-domains, you’ll need to create a separate widget for each. Facebook isn’t currently enabling aggregation across domains. The line breaks were added for clarity.
<iframe src="http://www.facebook.com/plugins/recommendations.php?
site=af-design.com&width=300&height=300&header=true&colorscheme=light&font&border_color"
scrolling="no"
frameborder="0"
style="border:none; overflow:hidden; width:300px; height:300px;"
allowTransparency="true"></iframe> |
The code is very simple to add to your site and the Facebook configuration tool walks you through the assorted options. The end result should create something like the following tailored to your site.
Activity Feed
This will show your visitors what content their friends are liking and using, back filled with the most recommended content from your site. The main differentiator here is the addition of the like content. This is important because visitors will see what their friends are finding valuable on your site.
<iframe src="http://www.facebook.com/plugins/activity.php?
site=af-design.com&width=300&height=300&header=true&colorscheme=light&font&border_color"
scrolling="no"
frameborder="0"
style="border:none; overflow:hidden; width:300px; height:300px;"
allowTransparency="true"></iframe> |
Again, the Facebook configuration tool creates the code quickly and easily for you with a few simple options. The end result should create something like the following tailored to your site.
REAL Analytics
As of yet, Facebook is not providing any hard numbers on how many people like a piece of content unless you create a page or an application. We’ll get into that next time. However, right now, you can indirectly infer the number of shares if you choose to use a share widget with a counter and of course with the recommend widget highlighting your most shared content.

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