Facebook referral traffic spike - who shared our post?

Question

My organization's blog got a MAJOR spike in traffic to one blog post yesterday. We can see in our Google Analytics that facebook.com and m.facebook.com were the by far the top referrers. I can't seem to be able to drill down deeper in Google Analtyics to see who shared the blog post URL on Facebook.

We suspect a large media/publishing agency must have posted it to their Facebook fans. We are just curious to see who may have done this for us.

Given we know the blog post URL, is there any way to see if it has been shared recently on Facebook?

EDIT:

I've gotten this far with FQL: SELECT user_id FROM like WHERE object_id="ID" which gives me ID's of people that have liked the blog post. It gives me only 100 ID's. How can I ask for ID's that are fan/business pages and not regular ole' people?

Answer 1

You might want to look into querying the status table, and searching for the url in messages?

See more https://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/fql/status

This Stack Overflow questions shows you how to search for strings: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4996710/facebook-fql-like-operator

(I haven't tried it in practice, so let me know how it goes.)

Answer 2

Facebook doesn't give much insight to webmasters about who shares their content.

From this article:

Unfortunately, what can be captured varies by where the users interact with the content; if they click through from the news feed., it will come through on a secured connection, and Google Analytics (and the browser) will only have the domain listed as the referrer, meaning no specific user information.

Only visits from the Pages' timelines themselves and a few other oddball situations will pass along referrer information, meaning the number of visits isn't an accurate representation of the traffic that Page or group drove to your site.

So you could potentially get your access logs and look for Facebook referrers from timelines, but most of the clicks are going to be from the news feed and not helpful to you.