How to see who has shared your content on Facebook

Search on Facebook for a URL while using an iPhone, and you'll see all those sharing that URL on the social network.

Danny Sullivan on March 16, 2016

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could easily see all the people mentioning your article, story or other content on Facebook, for free? Well, you can!

The technique is simple. Search for the URL of your content on Facebook, using an iPhone. This won’t work on tablets, desktop or with Android, that I’ve seen.

For example, here’s a search for our Search Engine Land story about Google’s news that mobile pages will get an extra ranking boost:

To get this list, I simply copied and pasted the entire URL into the Facebook search box. In response, it located those who had shared the URL. Some are grouped in the “Mentions” section at the top, but even more appear below that. If you click on any item, you’ll see the actual share:

This feature actually rolled out as part of Facebook’s changes to search last October, but I’d say it’s little known or often forgotten. Certainly I’d forgotten it when it came up today in a Twitter discussion.

I’d love to see an advanced feature where shares of content are sorted by those that have the most likes, or perhaps this could be integrated into Facebook Insights for those who have pages. Those insights do show Likes (and Loves, Hahas, Shares and so on):

However, the Insights tool doesn’t let you see the referring mentions, shares and so on.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Danny Sullivan

Danny Sullivan is a Founding Editor of Marketing Land. He’s a widely cited authority on search engines and

search marketing issues who has covered the space since 1996. Danny also serves as Chief Content Officer

for Third Door Media, which publishes Marketing Land and produces the SMX: Search

Marketing Expo conference series. He has a personal blog called Daggle (and keeps his

disclosures page there). He can be found on Facebook, Google + and microblogs on Twitter

as @dannysullivan.

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(Danny Sullivan) and site owner (http://marketingland.com/how-to-see-facebook-shares-169068).