Can't get 'like' buttons to work the right way

[FranticFish]

I need some pointers implementing Facebook 'like' buttons on a blog. I'm using Open Graph and the SDK.

As I understand it,

<fb:like href="*"> is where the actual article url would go, and
<meta property="og:url" content="*"> is the root url of the website

So what should happen by my understanding is that when a person likes or shares an article, then

(a) their newsfeed shows that article's url, and
(b) they subscribe to the Page for the business that runs the website.

I can't get this to work.

Instead what's happening is that the sharing and subscribing is to either the page or the website. I can't achieve separation.

Any ideas what I'm doing wrong?

[badbadmonkey]

No, subscriptions (likes) for a website (root) are different to those for an article.

An article is one of the few types of entities that you can't send updates to.
A website you can.

Your refs are confused, you want the Open Graph data to refer to the entity your like or recommend button is for (the article). If you have a separate like button, maybe label it "updates" or put it near an e-mail subscription or RSS feed, then that can be for the website.

I use "like" for the website and "recommend" for specific entities (articles), as this distinguishes the two and makes more semantic sense to me. I don't have any data to support the effectiveness. I find that people tend to use the like button at the top of a page (for the site) but steadfastly ignore the recommend button at the bottom of articles. Go figure.

If your articles are multi-page then make sure the like button for them refers only to the main (1st) page. The OG data on that page and its URL are then what are used in link descriptions etc on FB.

You can't get (a) and (b) to happen at the same time, at least not legitimately, and you'd probably annoy people if you did. If I "like" an article, I don't want the news feed for the whole site popping up on my FB wall.

[FranticFish]

Thanks for the reply; it's frustrating. If you have a large site and want people to be able to share individual articles in their feed then your Facebook Admin section will just get choked and unusable. Imagine having to log in to a different stats program for each and every page on your site!

So you can either not collect this data, or you can get them to like the whole site (or the Facebook Page for the site) and have that published in their feed rather than the actual content that they wanted to tell people about. Personally, I think that's pants.