: Facebook referral traffic spike - who shared our post? My organization's blog got a MAJOR spike in traffic to one blog post yesterday. We can see in our Google Analytics that facebook.com

@Megan663

Facebook doesn't give much insight to webmasters about who shares their content.

From this article:


Unfortunately, what can be captured varies by where the users interact with the content; if they click through from the news feed., it will come through on a secured connection, and Google Analytics (and the browser) will only have the domain listed as the referrer, meaning no specific user information.

Only visits from the Pages' timelines themselves and a few other oddball situations will pass along referrer information, meaning the number of visits isn't an accurate representation of the traffic that Page or group drove to your site.


So you could potentially get your access logs and look for Facebook referrers from timelines, but most of the clicks are going to be from the news feed and not helpful to you.

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@Shakeerah822

You might want to look into querying the status table, and searching for the url in messages?

See more developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/fql/status
This Stack Overflow questions shows you how to search for strings: stackoverflow.com/questions/4996710/facebook-fql-like-operator
(I haven't tried it in practice, so let me know how it goes.)

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