How do you do clickthrough tracking via the FB Share Dialog?

Question

According to Facebook's documentation for the Share Dialog , you can use Javascript to trigger open a share dialog so that the user can share whatever URL you pass in:

FB.ui({
  method: 'share',
  href: 'https://developers.facebook.com/docs?myTrackingParam=topShareButton',
}, function(response){});

However, if you want to do any referral tracking by appending a query string to the href property gets stripped, since the FB uses the og:url meta tag when it crawls the URL. I use the query params to track which share buttons are causing the most traffic. So my question: how can you do clickthrough tracking via the FB Share Dialog? Is there a way to set some query string value in the URL when sharing?

Answer 1

After some experimentation and piecing together separate FB docs, you can indeed set whatever value that gets passed back in the fb_ref query param . However, this requires us to turn the share into an Open Graph call.

So instead of using the share method, we could use the share_open_graph method. Thus, we can set the action_properties , which would include the ref property:

FB.ui({
  method: 'share_open_graph',
  action_type: 'og.shares',
  action_properties: JSON.stringify({
      object:'https://developers.facebook.com/docs',
      ref: 'topShareButton'
  })
}, function(response){});

Thus, the link that is shown on the Newsfeed/Timeline will be https://developers.facebook.com/docs?fb_ref=topShareButton . And now you can do whatever tracking your heart desires!