Sharing Links on Facebook Fan Pages – Update
November 19, 2010 5 Comments
Check out the section titled “Sharing Rich Media” at http://developers.facebook.com/docs/share. It describes how to use some custom Open Graph <meta> tags in the <head> section of your HTML. This way you can control the title, description and thumbnail image that displays when you or someone else shares a link on Facebook:
<meta property="og:title" content="title" />
<meta property="og:description" content="description" />
<meta property="og:image" content="thumbnail_image" />
<meta property="og:title" content="Frank Abagnale | November 30, 2010 - Tuesday, 8pm" />
<meta property="og:description" content="The Spielberg film, Catch Me If You Can, is his amazing life story" />
<meta property="og:image" content="http://www.baltimorespeakerseries.org/images/abagnale-l.jpg" />
Use the Facebook URL Linter tool to preview how your Open Graph tags will be viewed on Facebook before posting.
A few issues:
- You have to manually update the page you want to link to with these extra Open Graph <meta> tags ahead of time.
- Your page may not validate. For example, XHTML 1.0 Transitional does not have a “property” attribute.
If you already have a title, description and image on a page and you are happy with the way it displays on Facebook, there’s no need for this extra work. But by using these tags, you can make sure the title, description and thumbnail image are exactly the way you’d like them to be viewed (even more important if you are using Like/Recommend buttons or other people are linking to your pages). I’ve noticed when I have many images on a page, Facebook never seems to offer the one I prefer. And with the volume of Fan pages and friend’s posts, this could be the difference between getting noticed (click!) and just lost in the Facebook ether.
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Thanks, Dale. That’s some handy info. Too bad it doesn’t validate, as I’m using Strict on my site. But most sites don’t necessarily validate in the first place, even in Transitional, so I think this is fine to use as it won’t alter any visual elements on the site itself anyway.
I also don’t think it would cause any visual errors. I guess it just depends how important that is to you. When using any kind of embed code provided by Facebook, I’ve decided not to worry about this. The added functionality beats a page not validating.
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