Sharing Insights

Sharing insights are trends, demographics and more about how content from your website is being shared on Facebook. You can use this data to understand how people share your content in Facebook posts and comments. By learning what people like to share, you can optimize your content for your audience.

Sharing insights shows data for content shared on Facebook using the web as well as Android and iOS devices.

How Sharing Insights Works

Sharing insights identifies your URLs by using an app ID listed in the metadata of web pages. Data for all web pages using the app ID are shown in Facebook Analytics.

To access sharing insights, click the button below and choose the app name that corresponds to the app ID you're interested in. Then click "Facebook Platform" and choose "Sharing Insights" in the navigation.

Facebook Analytics

You may want to bookmark the sharing insights page for your app ID.

An app administrator who sets up an app ID has access to sharing insights for any URLs associated with the app ID. Administrators can give other people access by:

  1. Going to their apps on the Facebook Developers site
  2. Clicking on an app to access the app dashboard
  3. Clicking "Roles" in the navigation
  4. Clicking "Add Facebook Analytics Users"
  5. Entering their Facebook user names or Facebook IDs in the dialog

Data Provided in Sharing Insights

On the sharing insights page for your app, you'll see the 25 most frequently shared URLs (of the URLs associated with your app ID) for the time range you selected.

For each URL, you can view the following 4 fields:

  • Share Type — you can view the ways that people share a URL on Facebook, including posts, comments and total shares, which represents the sum of both posts and comments.

  • Gender — you can view what percentage of the people who shared your content were female, male or unknown. You can also choose to hide the field.

  • Age — you can view what percentage of people who shared your content fell into various age ranges.

  • Country — you can view what percentage of shares came from particular countries.

To get more data and more detailed breakdowns for a particular URL, click a URL in the top 25 list, or use the "Find a URL" button to look for a URL that may not be shown in the list.

The sharing insights page for a URL shows this data:

  • A graph of total shares, posts and comments for the date range you chose.
  • A chart of the aggregated age and gender for people who shared your content.
  • A chart of top countries where your content was shared.
  • A chart of top cities where your content was shared.
  • The aggregated sentiment that people expressed about the content.
  • A chart of aggregated statements that people mentioned in posts or comments with the URL.
  • A chart of aggregated popular quotes from your content that were shared along with the content. If no one shared quotes from your content, this field does not appear.

Enabling Sharing Insights

To enable sharing insights and see data about how your website content is being shared in Facebook posts and comments, you need to embed your app ID in your web content.

Sharing insights identifies your URLs by your app ID. If you don't have an app ID, click the button below to set one up.

Quickstart for Website

Adding Your App ID to Your Web Pages

To get data from sharing insights, you need to add a meta element containing your app ID to all web pages on your website or websites associated with your app ID.

<meta property="fb:app_id" content="{your-app-id}" />

In the above example, replace {your-app-id} with your actual app ID.

We recommend you add this metadata element to every page on the website or websites associated with your app ID.