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.
I switched to leenk.me this weekend. I love being able to customize the tweets and Facebook Fan Page notices from posts. That’s wonderful, but this is a problem. Why, when I feed my posts through other Facebook applications like RSS Graffiti, Hootsuite, or dlvr.it to my Fan Page, is the “share” button is there and usable? What makes leenk.me different from those applications?
Hi Beth,
Well, there are a couple of reasons which are somewhat moot right now. It looks like Facebook updated their API to allow a “hack” that makes the share link work (although it’s not the best User Experience). The problem is that the their developers never updated the three bug reports to tell us that the API has changed. I just happened to notice right now after I looked at the bug report and wanted to check the API for something.
Anyway, if you’re interested, these are the three bug reports:
http://bugs.developers.facebook.net/show_bug.cgi?id=12092
http://bugs.developers.facebook.net/show_bug.cgi?id=9075
http://bugs.developers.facebook.net/show_bug.cgi?id=14782
It’s still not a true “Share” link, it’s a fake “Share” link that almost looks and feels like a real one. So, I’ve updated the leenk.me API to use the new hack until Facebook can actually fix this.
Let me know if you run into any trouble.
Lew
Oh wow! That was impressively quick. Thanks so much!!!
No problem, it would have been there earlier if the Facebook developers notified us of the API change.
Lew
Aloha Lew, quick question… wondering if posts from wordpress to my facebook account have to get published to personal profile and the facebook page?
Iow, can I just post to my FB page?
Many thanks!
Hi Brent,
In your WordPress dashboard, go to the Facebook section of the leenk.me plugin and unckeck “Publish to Personal Profile?” and check “Publish to Fan Page?”. That should get you what you want.
Thanks.
Lew