This morning Facebook announced “a new version of the Share button with a live counter, and opened up the analytics associated with sharing on Facebook so that developers can measure engagement and view the number of shares, likes, and comments made on content.” This is a massive announcement from Facebook as it will open up a whole new set of opportunities for developers focused on aggregating social content from around the web.
This share button will help people track what the most popular content from around the web is. By adding the new Facebook share widget, Facebook will be able to focus becoming a source of information from around the web. A number of companies have already developed their own Facebook share widgets, however this new version developed by Facebook will help replace existing share widgets for Twitter and other sources.
Links.getStats
Also included in this new release is the Links.getStats API call which will enabled developers to find the number of times URLs from around the web have been shared. Opening up this data set paves the way for Facebook content aggregators from around the web. I’ve discussed this concept heavily over the past few months but it’s amazing to see Facebook finally open up this data.
Most incredible is that this data is accessible without an API key. You can use the rest server to find out how many times a URL has been shared. For example, by visiting the url http://api.facebook.com/restserver.php?method=links.getStats&urls=www.allfacebook.com you can find out that AllFacebook has been shared 266 times so far. You can also find out how many comments, clicks, and likes have taken place for each URL.
Making Information Publicly Available
This is a massive announcement from Facebook as it will permanently transform the way that information is aggregated around the web. Not only will news aggregators benefit from this announcement but search engines will also benefit as they can find out how “socially relevant” various sites are. According to Facebook, Techmeme, bit.ly, and awe.sm are already using this data to expand their analytics service.
Statistics about URLs just started getting counted so expect URL counts to start low. We’ll be posting updates later about this as we get more information about the new service and have time to play with it.
![[Inside Social Apps 2012]](http://www.allfacebook.com/wordpress/wp-content/themes/allfacebook2/images/ISA2012_336x100_F_RegisterNow.gif)
![[AllFacebook Stats: Facebook Analytics for Your Business]](http://www.allfacebook.com/wordpress/wp-content/themes/allfacebook2/images/stpro_allfacebookstats.gif)
![[How can Facebook change your business?]](http://www.allfacebook.com/wordpress/wp-content/themes/allfacebook2/images/FMB_A_MAY2011_336x100_F.gif)
test
Comment by Brij Mohan Karadia — October 29, 2009 @ 9:38 pm
Is there any way to see who's shared a particular URL? I cannot for the life of me figure out who shared a recent blog post.
Comment by Erica — November 13, 2009 @ 10:17 am
Will the URL parameter in Links.getStats give all shares beneath a domain? In your example, is the result returned from Facebook all shares for the domain, or just that individual URL?
Comment by Facebook User — November 13, 2009 @ 2:36 pm
Great post. Quick question:
The raw result for <a href="http://api.facebook.com/restserver.php?method=links.getStats&urls =www.allfacebook.com” target=”_blank”>http://api.facebook.com/restserver.php?method=lin…” target=”_blank”>=www.allfacebook.com
Gives you this:
http://www.allfacebook.com 323 4 14 341 9 http://www.allfacebook.com
So. Which numbers are which? 323 is shares, 4 is comments, 14 is … , 341 is clicks, 9 is likes?
Thanks!
Comment by Clark Fredricksen — December 10, 2009 @ 5:41 am
Ah. Figured it out.
Share count
Like Count
Comment Count
Total Count
Click Count
Comment by Clark Fredricksen — December 10, 2009 @ 5:54 am
Does anyone know if there is a method for calling Links.getStats on facebook with a domain name and get ALL shared links,likes,etc instead of just 1 page?
Our site contains thousands of pages, would love to see a "collected" overview of how many shares, likes, comments, etc our DOMAIN has. Doing this on a Page-by-Page level is far too tedious!
Comment by Blake — December 31, 2009 @ 7:49 am
I agree with Blake, I would be pretty interested, I tried Regex but with no luck…
Comment by Bruno Hug — August 18, 2010 @ 4:53 am
This article currently shows 83 FB shares in the widget at the top of the page but the API call ( http://api.facebook.com/restserver.php?method=lin... shows all zeros. Any ideas?
Comment by @bpm140 — October 19, 2010 @ 6:46 pm
Does anyone know if there's a user friendly interface to view these analytics? bit.ly might be the best….
Comment by Phi Pham — January 1, 2011 @ 7:07 pm