Leveraging Facebook with Great Looking Posts

From title to grabbing an image there are a number of attributes that Facebook uses to display your website page and I will show you how to do it correctly.

It's all about the SEO

If you are already a seasoned content creator for your website you will be very familiar with SEO but there are Facebook specific features that can be frustrating to get resolved and I will graze some these tasty morsels. For anyone unfamiliar with Search Engine Optimisation, SEO is a tool your website uses to convey meaning to search engines and Facebook is no exception.

Facebook uses their own tags and the ones we will focus on are listed here:

• Type eg. website
• Url the website page you are linking to
• Title - the title of the website
• Image - the thumb image to show when posting your website
• Description - a short description of your website page

Did you know that posting from a mobile phone allows you to target up to three additional groups that you follow?

Forgetting to target any one of these tags and Facebook will scrape data from other sources such as your home page to fill in the blanks. I aim to avoid this by ensuring I have good data for Facebook to use because once a page is scraped that is it. Your Facebook post will look ugly forever - until it is "scraped" again! We can force Facebook to scrape or to gather information from a page by visiting Facebook's debug tool (https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/). Scraping using this tool will update the page information for Facebook and is stored in cache. Facebook scraping occurs naturally  every 30 days maximum and according to their FAQ you can shorten this period using other tags like Expires and Cache-Control. So this tool is invaluable if you wanted to quickly update your page before posting and it doesn't require special permission to activate a scrape either.

I scraped Facebook's FAQ page which gave a warning about their missing image property which is understandable for a FAQ. A typical warnings that you may encounter is the dreaded fb:app_id error which is only dreaded because no one seems to know what it means. It means that you have not set up an app through Facebook's developers program which is something not required by most.

But How Do I Add Facebook Tags?

If you are using a content management system (CMS), tags will likely be managed for you. I prefer to have greater control how my tags are shown on different platforms and so I will target Facebook tags with their own format. For example I like Facebook titles to use the convention starting with the name of my website followed by the title of the website page for eg. Mixed Jungle | Campaigning on a Budget.

Sounds too complicated for me?

Facebook page scraping, SEO and tags can seem complex mechanisms but learning to master this requires a little exploration and minimal patience to master. Otherwise feel free to contact us at MJP and we can get you set on the right path.