Geodesic Solutions Community Wiki

Q: I "liked" a listing via the Sharing addon, but it didn't appear on my Facebook Timeline. What gives?

A: The first thing to note is that nothing is wrong with the GeoCore side of things – Facebook is simply selective in which "likes" receive "news stories." For each user, Facebook keeps track of all the things they "Like," and then uses that information to inform what type of posts appear most often in the News Feed / Timeline. This can sometimes mean that an actual "Like" itself appears in the feed, but that is not always the case. Facebook uses heuristics to determine what content is most likely to be important to a user, and shows him that. That content may include pages he has "Liked," or it may not.

Note also that you can improve the rate at which "Likes" of your site generate news stories by setting up the site as an Open Graph object. This basically requires that you create a Facebook App for your site and add the app_id to your site's metadata, via an fb:app_id tag. More information on that process is available on the Like Button Migration page.

To create a Facebook App, follow Steps 2 and 3 of Setting Up Facebook Connect

To check if a specific page contains all the needed data, you can use the Facebook Debugger. That tool has the added benefit of purging any cached copies of a page that Facebook has, so it can be useful to use if you've recently changed something and want to see if it has an effect.