Social Sharing

Owned by Chris Purser
Last updated: Dec 21, 2021 by George C. Luiz
4 min read

Getting the most of your social network opportunities

Get back to this page: https://rewr.app/opengraph


It’s really important to have your web provider assign open graph tags to the URL of social cards formatted for that network. To find out the image that is currently shared, visit: https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/  and enter your trade tool link. If you would like more info on Facebook Open Graph Tags, visit  Open Graph Tag Best Practices.

IMPORTANT: Facebook has important regulations for Facebook Ads.  To read what you need to know about this and how it pertains to this recipe, scroll down.

When you need your site (or even single page) to be share-friendly, there is a simple list of things you need to address.  It’s not hard, but it is specific. Then when you or someone visiting your site wants to share that page, the image below is what will show by default.

In order to set this up for yourself,

You need these 3 things:

  1. A “social Card” sized image – the image you want people to see.
  2. Your site name, or title of the share.
  3. A description of what the share is about.

Send those items, and page 3 of the Open Graph Tutorial document (downloadable on your right), to your website provider! That’s it!

Important!

Once you get everything set and you can confirm it in the Source of your page, you need to make sure that Facebook and Twitter (If you included the twitter tags) have an updated version of it all. If this is the first time setting it up, or if you've made changes, eventually they will be automatically updated. But if you want to be able to test it and see that everything is working, you'll need to force facebook (and twitter) to refresh that info. You can do that here
https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/ and https://cards-dev.twitter.com/validator.

Once there you enter your PAGE url. (the link to the specific page you are checking) and click "debug" (or "Preview card" on twitter). you'll see what they have for the info.  If it's not the new stuff you added, click Scrape Again (FB) or just repeat steps (Twitter) until the new information shows. If you try a few times and it won't update, try again after 10 minutes, then get some help from your WSP if it's still not updating.



Downloads

Download an Open Graph technical document that can help you explain to your Website Solution Provider what you’re asking for, empowering them to help you get what you need.

Facebook 80/20 Rule

IMPORTANT – Facebook “Social Cards” for Open Graph, Social Sharing and Posting are free of other than “responsible” regulation.  However, Boosted Posts and Facebook Paid Ads have much stricter content regulations, specifically with regards to an 80/20 rule: 80% image, 20% (or less) text.  Without a Pre-Approval mechanism, it makes it very difficult for us to provide Pre-Approved Facebook Ad and Boost images.

Still, we have made every effort to accommodate this restriction by adding a category called “Facebook Ad Approved” that contains items we believe adhere to all these guidelines. Unfortunately, since ads are often viewed by Facebook staff for compliance, sometimes images that seem to follow, get rejected still.  There is little we can do about this, but you can help.

We will be populating this section with more items soon.  Should you use one of these and it gets rejected by Facebook for this 80/20 rule, please notify us immediately, with details of the rejection, and we will work to provide a modified image as soon as possible, using the assets you previously bought licenses for.

Facebook Grid Tool

How much text can I include in my ad’s image? Images in your ads can include text that meets Facebook’s general advertising guidelines, but may not include more than 20% text in the image, to insure people only see high-quality content.  This includes logos and slogans in images. Facebook recommends that you use the text field in the ad to get your message across. To see if your ad image meets the 20% text limit:

  1. Go to the Grid Tool.
  2. Click Browse to upload an image you want to use in your ad. Perhaps one you downloaded from us, but that’s not required, of course.
  3. Click Show Grid (if it doesn’t present automatically) and a grid of 5×5 boxes will appear over your image.
  4. Click on the boxes to choose any that include text in your image. If text is present in 6 or more boxes then the image likely has more than 20% text and may not be eligible to be used in the ad.


Note: This grid is only demonstrative of how Facebook reviews ad images for text. They have the final say in whether or not your image is compliant with their policies.