Nowadays, almost every website or blog you visit asks you to share their content on social media. Most of these pages are usually shared on social media such as Facebook.
Facebook has over 1.5 billion daily active users and more than 2 billion monthly active users. So, it is very essential to get your content shared on Facebook to reach a vast amount of audience. But, just sharing the page doesn’t get you enough audience unless you know how to use the Facebook meta tags.
Facebook uses what’s called the ‘Open Graph Protocol’ introduced in 2010 to decide what things to display when you share a link. Facebook crawls this link and looks for Open Graph meta tags on these sites. It’s based on these meta tags that Facebook decides how the content should look like when it’s shared on Facebook. All of the Facebook meta tags should be added inside the ‘head’ tag and are prefixed with ‘og:’ followed by a specific property.
Let’s look at some of the most important Facebook tags.
Basic meta tags
1. og:title
In most cases, the content should be the title of your article without any branding such as your site name. Even though there is no limit to the number of characters, its best to keep it between 60 and 90.
2. og:description
The description should be a summary of the content on the page and usually between 2 and 4 sentences. It will be displayed just below the title when shared on Facebook.
3. og:image
Facebook uses the specified image in this tag when someone shares the content with Facebook. According to facebook’s best practice guides, images should be at least 600 pixels in width and recommends using 1:1 images.
4. og:url
The URL must be the canonical URL for your page. This should be the undecorated URL, without session variables, user identifying parameters, or counters. Also, mobile domain URLs should point to the desktop version of the URL.
5. og:site_name
It should be the name of the Web site in which the shared page resides.
6. og:type
It should specify the type of content on the page. If you don’t specify a type, the default is ‘website’. The complete list of types supported is available here.https://ogp.me/#types.
7. og:locale
It specifies the locale of the resource. The default value is en_US. If you have other available language translations available, you can use ‘og:locale:alternate’.
Besides these basic tags, Facebook also provides specific meta tags for media contents such as images, videos, and 3D assets. You can check them out here.https://developers.facebook.com/docs/sharing/webmasters#media.
The complete list of Facebook meta tags are available here.https://ogp.me/.