Linking Facebook activity and your post

[andrep]

Hi everyone, I'm sure you know how images tend to do better in Facebook. The problem is, if I post an image on Facebook, and link to a blog post in the comment of that image, the activity of that Facebook post wouldn't be pulled into the blog post.

That is, the blog would show 1 "like" when the post on Facebook is actually getting 150 "likes".

That wouldn't be the case if I posted a link instead of an image.

Does anyone know of a work-around?

Thanks.

[GeorgeAndrews]

Use an image in your post and then open graph markup on your blog pages. Then when you post the link to your blog post to Facebook, Facebook will pull in the image from your post and maintain the link to your post (not the image).

Here are a few posts for how to do it:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/structured-social-sharing-formula-whiteboard-friday

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/rock-your-seo-with-structured-social-sharing-mozcon-presentation

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-web-developers-interactive-cheatsheet-for-seo-and-the-open-graph

Hope this helps!

[andrep]

Thanks for the response George! Our site has the markup, but when I post the link, and Facebook pulls the image, it only pulls the thumbnail, not the full image.

On a Facebook user's stream, a thumbnail and a full image are very different. The latter takes up a lot more property, and therefore gets seen more, and interacted with more.

Is that right or did I miss something?

[GeorgeAndrews]

Ahh OK. I don't think you're missing anything. Facebook will use a thumbnail, yes.

In that case, I don't think there's much you can do if people are just liking your photo and not clicking the link. Perhaps including more text describing the benefits of clicking through would help them click and then include sharing capabilities on the post will influence some of the visitors to like/share.

Sorry I couldn't be of more help!

[andrep]

Thanks George! I get quite a few people clickthrough, but it would be ideal to pull that data together.

[GeorgeAndrews]

Yeah definitely!