Find Out Who Shared Your URL on Facebook
Finding out who linked to you on social media
I noticed that when I published an article yesterday, I had a few referrals come through from Facebook. But when I clicked to find out exactly where on Facebook my post was shared I couldn’t actually find the exact location of the referral page on Facebook.
I came to conclusion that I’d need some sort of tool as Google Analytics wasn’t showing me exactly where the referral came from and nor was WordPress’ Jetpack. I searched and searched with long-tail inputs such as “find out who linked to you on facebook” and came up with results from 2011 that really weren’t relevant today. Suggestions included using Facebook’s internal search system, which no longer works how it once did.
Social Mentions – A social listening tool
I then somehow came across a website called “Social Mentions“, and it provided me with the ability to find exactly who was sharing my post and where. The tool itself works like a search engine and you simply have to type in the keywords or in my case I typed parts of the title of the page that was being shared on Facebook. Again, that was the post from yesterday about Halifax being partially penalised.
You can see the results here:
It picked up exactly where these shares were coming from, and from this I could identify who was sharing and why. For example, yesterday’s post was shared by someone because I had commended their detective work on Halifax.co.uk penalty, which happened to be a case study on Link Research Tools. Perhaps, I should commend a lot more often!
What I found
A little surprise.
That’s pretty neat. I’ll be using this tool for a lot more as it such a useful tool.
August 8, 2014
I keep seeing that my link has been shared 21 times on facebook, but the website you suggested can’t come up with anywhere that it’s actually been shared. How could that be?
August 24, 2014
Hi Tiana,
Do you know the specific page that was shared that many times? Unfortunately you can’t just type your domain into the search and find things that way. It’s all done contextually, so you’ll need to search for your post title/name (hopefully it’s relatively unique post title).
August 27, 2014
Hmm, this didn’t seem to work for me. :/ The person must have shared it privately.
November 13, 2014
I have 3 Facebook shares on my last post but the site can’t find anything.
November 16, 2014
I think it depends on whether the post was shared privately or publicly. Obviously this tool won’t be able to find anything shared privately.
November 25, 2014
One of my posts has been shared 21 times, but Social Mentions doesn’t show any of them. It must have been shared privately. Thanks for sharing the site though – could come in handy someday! @Foxy_O
May 11, 2015
Didn’t work. Show many links, none of them related to my post (typed in sarch box), that has 18 shares in facebook.
May 12, 2015
Hey Ricardo,
Sorry that this didn’t work for you.
I’m going to update this post with another technique that I’ve found, which will hopefully be useful for those looking to find a succinct answer to this question. 🙂
June 4, 2015
looking forward for this tool… 🙂
August 1, 2015
my website some post’s were share on facebook but social mention not shown.
September 23, 2015
One of my sites show 83 facebook shares but I have NO WAY of knowing who shared them. They don’t appear on the search engines either and I don’t think 83 people shared them all privately.