Awe.sm Lets You Track Articles Shared Into Facebook

Awe.sm Lets You Track Articles Shared Into Facebook: "

Web publishers have no great way to keep track of how many times articles gets shared on Facebook, as the company keeps that information private. So, if you’re trying to figure out how frequently your content is being shared on Facebook, the best way to approximate is simply to watch your analytics for how many visitors to any given content come from Facebook.com.

Awe.sm has devised a button-style widget called fbshare.me that lets readers share an article on Facebook, and then tracks clicks through that link. The service shows you the total number of times your article has been shared through the button, as well as the number of times those shared links were clicked on. Note that this number includes all shares of your article through Awe.sm, including from services like Sociable and AddToAny.

It’s not quite the same as the Retweet button for articles on Twitter offered by companies like Tweetmeme and Backtype, as those show you the total number of retweets across all of Twitter. But it could shed some light on the world of Facebook sharing.

The button was built as a weekend project on top of the company’s “Aggregate Data” API, which shows you anonymized, aggregated data for a given URL shared through the service. Awe.sm is more generally a URL shortening service with an analytics service layered on top, so this is another way for the company to get traffic to measure. Every time somebody shares content through Awe.sm, a unique link is generated. This link is encoded with metadata about the shared item, including where the link is being shared to — Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. Among other details, the button comes in either large or small sizes, and also lets you include parameters for Google Analytics.

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