Is Your Site Ready for Facebook Shares?
If you don’t know anything about Open Graph, then the answer is no.
Here are the tags to use:
<meta property=”og:image” content=”http://yourname.com/images/logo.jpg” />
The full url to the image you created that you specifically want Facebook to show as a thumbnail when you are shared. That means no relative urls, be sure to include the http:// so a bot from the outside can get all the way to it. If you don’t use this in the head section of your web page, and you or somebody shares your page on Facebook, FB will try to guess what to show and you don’t know what image will end up in the post for everyone to see (if any).
Also be aware of these:
<meta property=”og:url” content=”http:// the canonical link” />
Are there different ways to get to the page? Meaning different urls that lead to the info you want to share? One with www one without? Some other variations generated by content management systems with different parameters in the url? Do you want your analytics to be nice and clean? Then consider this.
Have you ever been annoyed at Facebook shares where read the “title” and then start reading below and the next thing you see is an exact duplicate of the same title? If you want to look professional and have complete control over how your pages are shared online, use these tags to your advantage:
<meta property=”og:type” content=”article” />
<meta property=”og:title” content=”The Title of your Article” />
<meta property=”og:description” content=”A short description of the article” />
If the above doesn’t make sense to you (especially the stuff in blue), but you care about how your shares look on social media, give me a shout to discuss.
Summary: I feel that IMAGE is perhaps most important because it’s the quick visual that can grab viewers’ eyes and make the strongest first impression, which can be stellar or major fail. Then TITLE and DESCRIPTION because those are what people read before deciding to click for more, and you don’t want the redundancy bumble. Also, you may want to specify some different wording than what FB would pickup from your page’s generic title and description metas.
