Facebook is one of the most important social networking site for bloggers as it helps in driving traffic to their blogs from the Facebook Pages and News Feeds. Facebook also provides various social plugins like Recommendations Box, Activity Feed, Recommendations Bar etc to put on the blogs to reduce the bounce rate and to increase the user engagement.

But just having the Facebook social plugins on your blog is not enough. They must serve the purpose properly too. So just like the advertisements on your blog, you need to check the performance of the Facebook social plugins too with respect to the size and placement.

Facebook does not provide any stat regarding the performance of the social plugins. But by tweaking the social plugin codes slightly, you can measure the performance of the Facebook social plugins on your blogs. Just follow the steps given below.

HOW TO : Check the Performance of Facebook Social Plugins on Your Blog

1. Login to Facebook and generate the code for the Facebook social plugin of your choice like Recommendations Box, Activity Feed or the Recommendations Bar.

2. Now add the 'ref' parameter to the Facebook social plugin code manually according to your choice.

3. For example, if you are going to put the code on the sidebar or at the end of the post or only at homepage then you can add parameters like ref="homepage", ref="sidebar" or ref="bottom" etc.

4. If you are using each type of social plugin just once then, you can use their name directly in the parameter like ref="recommendation", ref="activity" etc. to know which plugin is getting more clicks.


5. Now when a reader will click a link on the plugin, the ref value will be passed back as a fb_ref parameter in the referrer URL which you can check on StatCounter or Google Analytics. The referrer URL will look like the example depending on the parameter you have added -

http://www.facebook.com/l.php?fb_ref=homepage or

http://www.facebook.com/l.php?fb_ref=sidebar


Since Facebook provides different types of codes, so keep the required format in mind while adding the 'ref' parameter to the code. For example, the parameter added in thee XFBML code will be like

<fb:recommendations ref="homepage"></fb:recommendations>

and in the IFRAME code, the added parameter will be like

<iframe src="...&ref=homepage"></iframe>
 
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