Number of Facebook Likes on homepage keeps resetting to lower number

Question

We've had a Facebook Like button on our homepage (i.e. associated with a URL not our Facebook Page) for a few months, and nearly every other day the number of likes resets from the actual number of Likes (over 200) to the number of Shares (6). Every time it happens, we run the URL through the Facebook linter and (usually) it will be fixed right away - though sometimes it will take a few hours or even days. Our site defaults to https: but we run the linter on both the http: and https: URLs.

We've done a lot of online research and we have not found a straight forward answer of how to stop this from continuing to happen - any thoughts?

Answer 1

Bug 14171 in Facebook's bug tracker reports the same problem you describe. The ticket is marked as "assigned", so it's not resolved yet. You might like to track its status there, though.

Possible workaround
You could hide the Like count in your button, then use Facebook's Graph API to retrieve an accurate count and display it on the page. For example, this URL retrieves JSON-formatted data for Coca Cola's Facebook page: https://graph.facebook.com/cocacola