Facebook Share button more effective than Likes?

A recent post at SEOMoz suggested that their research has found a better correlation between facebook shares than Facebook likes. The full post is here and makes for an interesting read. One of the things that really caught my attention was in the comments and I quote:

“After chatting with our Google rep it seems that FB shares have much more SEO weighting than FB Likes and similar. This is due to a replication of the link to the page, so essentially, organic link building. Similarly to retweets, its a physical replication of the original posted URL, meaning more inbound links, meaning more overall linkjuice.” Alex Quail

I dread to think how much Alex is spending with Google to be put in contact with a useful representative but that is besides the point.

The bottom line is that this research suggests that Facebook shares are more influential than:-

• Backlinks
• Tweets
• Facebook Likes

So with this in mind how can we effectively implement a facebook share button into your websites.

It is hard to find official information on this as Facebook is trying to change everyone over to the like buttons. The basic method is as follows:-

<a name=”fb_share” type=”box_count” href=”http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php%22%3EShare%3C/a%3E%3Cscript” rel=”nofollow”>Share</a>
<script</a> src=”<a href=”http://static.ak.fbcdn.net/connect.php/js/FB.Share&quot” rel=”nofollow”>http://static.ak.fbcdn.net/connect.php/js/FB.Share&quot</a>; type=”text/javascript”></script>

This is OK but what we really want is a custom solution that is more flexible. We need to be able to use our own button and get creative with getting as many FB shares as possible.

This is what we have come up with:-

<a target=”_blank” href=”http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=http://www.jetinternetmarketing.co.uk/test/testing.php”><img src=”facebooksharebutton.png” border=”0″/></a>

You can see a working example here.

We can now use custom buttons to encourage users to click through to share your pages on facebook. Bear in mind there is a doorway page which asks them to add a message so you can’t get too creative with it.

I hope this is helpful. I’ll leave you with some ideas for how you could implement this on to various sites:-

1. Tell the world you’re staying at xyz hotel
2. Let your friends know you’re cooking xyz recipe tonight
3. Get the word out about xyz band
4. Share our page and download a free xyz
5. Ask your facebook friends opinion on xyz
6. You can see a working example here 🙂
7. Leave us a message on facebook
8. Submit your comments to our live team on Facebook
9. Tell us what you think of xyz
10. Share your thoughts on Facebook