Metatags to support high quality content sharing into Facebook
Facebook has documented the metadata it looks for (OpenGraph) to enable rich content sharing.
When we or one of our readers shares our content into Facebook, we want it to look as good as possible.
When Facebook receives the URL of a page, it scrapes that page to figure out what to put into the status update. Unfortunately Facebook frequently produces a sub-optimal thing, and it's really frustrating. Fortunately, Facebook has documented some metatags they claim to be using to improve status updates.
The main key are
OpenGraph metatags. The Facebook Documentation for OpenGraph but the presentation is skewed towards an "application" author who wants to publish "stories" like “Hugo read Catch 22 on Goodreads” (actor=Hugo, action=read, object=Catch 22, application=Goodreads). What we're looking for is the way to improve the format/information of a Facebook "share".
The sharing checklist includes a list of metatags which are useful for sharing.
On
Using Self-Hosted Objects gives some examples about how the metatags look in practice. Basically, we're talking about <meta> tags with specific property names.
On
the reference for 'article' pages there are examples of the metatags for Articles. If we equate Article with Blog Post, that's a typical use-case of improving sharing a blog post on Facebook.
The
Facebook Object Debugger let's you test/explore the data that Facebook retrieves from a given page.
