Facebook Likes and Shares difference?

[PhotoGazza]

How does the facebook like value differ from the Facebook share value?

How does the Like number increase?

[Mark_Jay_Apsey_Jr.]

Gareth-

Facebook share is gone...this is from the facebook site....

The Share button has been deprecated in favor of the Like button and Feed Dialog, and will no longer be supported. Please use the Like button or Feed Dialog whenever possible to drive maximum traffic to your apps.

You get facebook likes from havign someone facebook "like" thumbs up your site or account.

Mark

[PhotoGazza]

I understand Facebook's terminology of a share has gone.  However, if you like something on Facebook, a website etc, the counter here for example will go up:

http://graph.facebook.com/?id=http://www.seomoz.com

Yet that shows Shares, not likes.

In SEOMoz the Facebook Shares Tooltip says:

"Total number of times the URL was posted on a Facebook page"

This corresponds to the likes my sites have had (always).

Yet, in the Facebook likes I can't understand where it gets the values from.  The tooltip on Seomoz says: "Total number of times this URL and Facebook comments on this URL were Liked. Does not include Likes of Facebook Page or Likes via embedded buttons on the URL."

It doesn't make sense.  It's like as if some of it is labelled the wrong way around on SeoMoz.

[PhotoGazza]

Any more feedback?

[Miranda.Rensch]

Hi PhotoGazza,

We pull Facebook Shares and Facebook Likes from Facebook's FQL. They define Shares as, "The number of times users have shared the page on Facebook." and Likes as, "The number of times Facebook users have 'Liked' the page, or liked any comments or re-shares of this page." In this context, a page is defined as a URL on the web (ie not a Facebook page).

So, I believe that a share is a count of the total number of times that Facebook knows a URL has been shared on Facebook in general (whether through a status update, comment, etc, public and private) but to be perfectly honest, Facebook doesn't make it 100% clear. You can check out their documentation here: http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/fql/link_stat/

Hope that helps. Let me know if you have any more questions. Thanks!

Miranda