Did You Know, Facebook Drops Your Referral/Affiliate link?
Dear Readers,
Did you know that when you post a link on Facebook, sometimes it drops your affiliate or referral link?
Usually when you post a link in a status message Facebook shows you two links.
The one you typed and then a thumbnail/preview version. As a part of the thumbnail they think they’re going to do you the favor of showing the actual domain of the website. BUT this means they drop your referral link! If anyone clicks on that link you don’t get referral credit!
See the photo below for an example:
As you can see my original link was http://www.40waystousecards.com/ben
In the screen shot above you can see that after the title of my site Facebook puts in a link to the root domain. It is one thing if Facebook displays that visually, but maintains the correct link. However if you mouse over or click on that link you’ll see they drop my referral code off the end!
How do you fix it?
Instead of posting an affiliate link, get your own domain name and redirect it. If you use domain masking you can still direct your domain name to your affiliate link and the domain that shows up on Facebook will be your domain not the affiliate site.
Alternatively, just don’t let Facebook show the thumbnail. You can usually delete the thumbnail when you insert links if you want.
Did you know that Facebook was doing this?
How many times have you posted a link and had someone click on the wrong one? Could you have lost 10% of your visitors? 20%? more?
I wonder if anyone has considered suing Facebook over this. I would imagine it has cost a lot of marketers a lot of money!
If you enjoyed this post get free updates via email or RSS here.
