Are you a social media manager or website owner?
Listen up.
Very important news here from Facebook.
This might seem a little technical at first, but keep reading. I’ll explain how this impacts your business and blog.
In an effort to combat fake news, Facebook is changing their Graph API and they’re deprecating the ability to customize link previews for profiles and groups which includes image, title or description for curated posts.
What does this mean?
It means that if your Open Graph (OG) data is not properly configured on your website, people are less likely to share your content.
If your OG data is not optimized, people are less likely to share your content. Here's whyClick To TweetYou and I both know that people won’t share posts with awful images, poor titles, and missing descriptions. It messes with the feed composition–that overall look and feel as visitors scroll through your wall.
Here’s what you need to do right now:
You need to make sure that your Open Graph (OG) data is properly configured.
If you know how to “view page source” in your browser, look in the <head> section for code that looks something like this:
<!-- Social Warfare v2.2.10 https://warfareplugins.com --> <meta property="og:type" content="article" /> <meta property="og:title" content="Grow Your Pinterest Traffic with Super Optimized Sharing!" /> <meta property="og:description" content="The most powerful social sharing plugin just got even better at optimizing your blog posts and pages for Pinterest! Get more out of people pinning your posts!" /> <meta property="og:image" content="https://warfareplugins.com/wp-content/uploads/version-2-2-9-1200x630.jpg" /> <meta property="og:image:width" content="1200" /> <meta property="og:image:height" content="630" /> <meta property="og:url" content="https://warfareplugins.com/social-warfare-2-2-9/" /> <meta property="og:site_name" content="Warfare Plugins" /> <!-- Social Warfare v2.2.10 https://warfareplugins.com -->
Notice the use of og: throughout the code.
That’s what this is all about.
When you share a link into Facebook, it generates a preview of the page. Facebook uses og: code (a.k.a. open graph meta data) in order to display the image, title, and description.
If you don’t have this code optimized, it’s going to cost you.
Up until now, you could customize all of those elements before sharing in Facebook or with other social media management tools like Buffer or CoSchedule. But as of today, Facebook is removing that ability.
So how do you write all this code?
You either have your developer do it by hand or you get yourself a plugin to automatically do it for you.
In fact, that’s exactly why we created Social Warfare.
To help get your content shared the way you want it shared, and to optimize the Open Graph (OG) meta data easily without having any knowledge of code.
After you install Social Warfare, go over to Facebook testing tool and see what your blog posts look like.
You’ll be able to test and make sure your blog post is optimized correctly with an image, title, and description.
If the test results aren’t what you want, use your Social Warfare dashboard and fix them. You just need to log into your “edit post” dashboard, scroll down to the “Social Warfare Custom Options” section, and make sure that you’ve uploaded your “Social Media Image”, filled in your “Social Media Title” and written your “Social Media Description” and press “Update”.
It’s that simple.
Maybe this isn’t going to affect you. Maybe it will.
But you can’t know until you test.
Take a look here.
This is the open graph testing tool result for a test page I created.
Notice the image is great, but the title is the website URL and the description is missing.
Or even worse, this one where there’s no image at all.
What should you see?
- Optimized Image that is not cropped, stretched, or missing
- Optimized Title that uses all possible characters
- Optimized Description that tells more about what the post is and why you should click through to read the full article.
Here’s an example of a perfectly optimized post using Social Warfare to generate the OG data.
That’s exactly how your post will appear when shared to Facebook from now on.
Bottom line, if you don’t optimize your OG data, don’t be surprised when you see your shares falling off.
This is why.
So… what do you need?
You need a plugin that will help you optimize your posts once and for all.
Like Mark Traphagen of Stone Temple Consulting said,
“We use Social Warfare which makes it super easy to set our OG tags for each page.”
Social Warfare, is the best social sharing plugin for WordPress.
$29/yr to make Facebook happy.
It’s a small investment. It’s up to you.
Does this plugin work for Buffer too?
Hi Dave! Social Warfare – Pro does have a Buffer button.
Hello! Nice Article…
Glad you enjoyed it Jackson
Upgraded to the paid version of your plugin and love it, being able to set the OG tags in such an easy way during editing of a post is great.
So glad to hear that Karen! 😀
Hi! Nice Article… 🙂
Thanks, glad you enjoyed it.
Hi Jason,
I really like the way it handle OG data. Specially it’s integration with Yoast SEO is a big help. No need to worry about which metadata to set where.
I am still exploring the capabilities of this plugin and till now it’s a great experience.
Thanks,
Sanjeev
Yeah we made sure to consider the 1000s of people that use Yoast and their setting. Here’s an article that explains how we “play nicely” with Yoast https://warfareplugins.com/support/open-graph-twitter-cards-yoast-seo/
Glad you are enjoying the plugin. Let us know how we can help. See you around.
Thank you for this informative post on Facebook’s change to custom link previews. I’m a Social Warfare and make sure to populate all the fields before posting. I just used the Facebook testing tool you posted and everything looks great! Thank you for your continued work on Social Warfare. I look forward to seeing what you have in store for us with some of your future updates. And keep up the informative blog posts!
I’m glad to hear about your FB testing tool results Joe. That’s awesome.
We have found that you are not alone with enjoying the more informative / “how – to” type posts so we have a list of articles coming out that will help you use Social Warfare to its full potential.
Have you signed up for the newsletter? Something to consider.
Thanks
I have Social Warfare on a few websites, but I don’t use it for Facebook OpenGraph. The reason why is because I use Yoast’s Premium SEO plugin for that. Is there something that Social Warfare can do that Yoast SEO can’t in regards to Facebook OpenGraph?
We had several customers say the same thing about Yoast. Here is a great article that helps to answer your question Tom
https://warfareplugins.com/support/open-graph-twitter-cards-yoast-seo/
Read that, and if you still have questions, we are here.
Thanks
Hey Jason, great explanation for Facebook’s recent changes. I think they also need to implement a linkscanner so that are verifying the pages that we want to click on. This way, if the OG data doesn’t match the URL, it flags users that the content might be misrepresented. I have gotten a few bad redirects in the past.
When you say “they” you mean the user who is testing their link via FB testing tool? Are you talking about something like a bitly tester or link shorter tester? Sorry, I’m not following you.
Great info as always and my OG data is configured properly in part to your plugin:
Great to hear. And like I said on FB, you were one of the reasons that this post was written.
Thanks for thinking of us and helping our team stay on top of the news.
I don’t think you and I had met before. Good to meet you Robert