As part of our ongoing improvements to the site, we have made it easier for people to share our content on social networking websites like Facebook.
You may have noticed that yesterday evening there are now social share links to Facebook and Google plus attached to articles:
So importantly you can now Like individual articles on libcom.org on Facebook.
Liking an article shares it to your timeline, which can increase traffic, and also provide feedback to the author and contributor of the article so they know it was appreciated. So if you like an article, please Like it!
On privacy note, don't worry your Facebook/twitter/Google plus accounts are not linked to your libcom account in any way by this function.
On a dorky note, it also means you can see which articles have been most shared on social networking sites. And we would like to know which has been the most popular. The most popular one we have seen so far is the Loukanikos riot dog photo gallery with over 1800 Facebook likes. Does anything beat that?
Comments
About this, I was wondering
About this, I was wondering if we should change it from "Like" to "recommend".
On the plus side, I think people would be more likely to Recommend articles about things which weren't nice, like a massacre or what have you. Because they would recommend the article rather than be seen to be Liking the event.
However, recommend seems like a more active commitment to something, whereas most people are very used to randomly Liking various stuff. What do people reckon?
I just 'Liked' Driving the
I just 'Liked' Driving the NHS to Market and the sub-heading caption it put on Facebook was...
:confused: (unliked for now)
Please don't un-like it for
Please don't un-like it for that reason! I noticed that when I posted it to the libcom Facebook page as well, it's weird I don't know why did that but I can't do anything about it.
OK, was getting the same
OK, was getting the same issue pasting the link into FB manually. I did some investigation... please bear with me...
I found out that articles must have description meta tag or else Facebook looks for first aragraph with at least 120 chars. Facebook caches descriptions and re-scrapes every 24 hours or when triggered by entering the URL on a debug page.
I don't think you're using description meta tags, I can also see that when sharing an article with a short introduction paragraph, the next longer paragraph is used. When the introduction is long, that's used.
As the introduction paragraph is exactly 120 characters long I thought maybe this was posted and shared when it had a shorter introduction and so whatever else was on the page at the time was scraped, used and cached. However, debugging the URL again just picked up another random paragraph found on the scraped page (you can see what FB scrapes by clicking 'See exactly what our scraper sees for your URL' at the bottom of the debug results). So perhaps the minimum is slightly more than 120, or there are some caveats with that figure, or something else...
Anyway.... hope this is useful information! And FYI, I realised that when you share an article manually on FB, you can edit the header or description by double clicking them.
Wow, that's useful stuff,
Wow, that's useful stuff, thanks. Especially that you can edit the header or description, I never knew that!
One thing which would be good to know is how it identifies which thumbnail to use. Because for some reason many of them it seems to share the thumbnail attached to the featured article on the right-hand side of the page, rather than the image attached to the article
One wondering which has been
One wondering which has been the most like page on libcom, I just found this one which beats Loukanikos with over 2300 likes:
http://libcom.org/blog/greek-hospital-now-under-workers-control-05022012
and this at 2100
and this at 2100 likes
http://libcom.org/blog/world%E2%80%99s-biggest-ever-strike-india-28th-february-2012-24012012
and this
and this 1900
http://libcom.org/blog/thatcher%E2%80%99s-funeral-plans-are-finalised-14122011
not that I am a nerd
working class self
working class self organisation
well found!
of course not…
Itѕ such as yoս read my
Itѕ such as yoս read my thoughts! You seеm to know so much about this, like you wrotе the b᧐ok in it
or something. I feel that you simрly could do with a few % to drive the message house а little bit,
but other than that, that is excellent blog. A great read.
I will certainly be back.
my page ... Jui Residences