Facebook “Share” Link Now Available (Kind Of)

UPDATE: Currently the "share" link only appears on Profiles not Fan Pages. If you are posting to a Fan Page you should not enable the Share Link until Facebook fixes this.

Hello Everyone, One of the most common emails I get for the leenk.me Facebook module is about the lack of the "share" link on a Facebook post. This has always been a limitation imposed on third-party developers by the Facebook API. This morning I was looking into open bug reports on Facebook for some outstanding issues and I noticed that Facebook has a method called links. Without going into too much detail, the normal method used by leenk.me to post to Facebook is the feed method.

There are pros and cons to both options. With feed you can customize pretty much everything about your post (but it doesn't include the share link). With links you can only customize the message, Facebook will determine what it thinks should be the Link Name, Caption, Description and Image. Normally Facebook does a decent job of this, but sometimes it is way off. In my testing Facebook included a "share this" image or the site's header image for a post that had no image in it. I tested a post  with only a single word in the content and Facebook used completely different text from my test site. But other tests worked beautifully. I suspect if you use your posts normally, include a main image in the post and have decent content, then Facebook will not have a problem getting the correct content for the link information.

So, when you update to leenk.me 1.2.8, you will see a new option: "Include Share Link?" found under the Facebook module. If you check this and save the settings, the ability to customize the Link Name, Caption, Description, and Image will be disabled. You may find that Facebook does a great job on your site of figuring out what the content and image should be. Hopefully Facebook will be expanding this method in the future to allow us to customize these fields. At the very least, if the share link is important to you, then this is the method of achieving it.