Usually there is an issue when we share a link a topic on social networks: people comment to the topic on the network itself, instead of going to the forum and doing a proper forum-reply.
Time ago, using a different forum software, we made a plugin, which every X minutes, checked if a topic URL was shared on Facebook, and if was found, it grabbed the comments users made on Facebook and shown them as replies (indicating those were made at Facebook, linking to the corresponding user profiles), this replies were inserted chronologically into the discussion.
This way all of our topic had more interaction and those comments were not “missed” outside the forums. As the topic got more interaction, more users signed the forums and replied more, etc.
this is a great idea! although i tink there would be problem about them not having an account, but i suppose you could just import there FB settings…
You can show the post with their profile picture and FB username, just linking to their Facebook profile and to the status update where the original comment is located!
I forgot to mention on my original post that this checks for links shared on a specific facebook page (which is related to the site, of course) so we provide App id, Page id and Application secret variables. Hope that helps?
. It is your facebook page. Not everywhere