Track Likes in real-time with Facebook tools

Ronny Kerr · March 8, 2011 · Short URL: https://vator.tv/n/17ea

Likes, comments, demographics and more: social plugins for third-party developers get a boost

Facebook announced Tuesday the launch of real-time analytics for social plugins, letting website owners track user interaction via likes, comments and more as they happen.

“We hope the real-time reporting and additional granularity help you quickly identify opportunities to highlight engaging content,” says Facebook engineer Alex Himel.

Arriving nearly a year after the release of social plugins and other powerful developer features for integrating Facebook with third-party sites, the new version of Insights for Websites is immediately available on the Facebook developers site.

Here’s what’s new:

Like button analytics: Access real-time analytics for the Like button on your website and on Facebook, including anonymized data for how many people saw the button, how many clicked it, how many saw Like stories on Facebook and how many clicked Like stories to visit your site.

Comments box analytics: Following on the launch of an updated comments box, site owners can now track how many people saw comments, left comments, saw comment stories on Facebook and clicked through from those stories to your site.

Popular Pages: See the top 100 pages that people are liking, commenting on and sharing.

Demographics: Without revealing personally identifiable information, Facebook reports demographic information, for gender, age range, country, and language, for interactions on your site.

Organic sharing: Claim access to Insights and see how many people are sharing links to your site on Facebook, even if you haven’t implemented social plugins.

Half the appeal of adding social elements to a website are the instantaneous and timely conversations and interactions made possible by sites like Facebook and Twitter. So it makes sense that a successful program like Facebook’s social plugins would eventually be updated to include real-time tracking capabilities.

More than 2.5 million websites have integrated with Facebook since social plugins launched in April 2010, according to the company, and 10,000 more join the ranks every day. Each month, over 250 million people interact with plugins on third-party sites.