Recent changes at Facebook have us scrambling to be sure our content displays well for social sharing, and it’s especially important to note that Facebook has recently changed the aspect ratio for images from square to 1.91:1 for both its mobile and desktop feeds. Square images now appear cropped, often poorly. We have found the following helpful guides and links:
Be sure your web page, theme or plugin inserts Open Graph meta tags for title, image and url. Several WordPress plugins do this well, including WordPress SEO by Yoast and SharePress. Then check the developer documentation for the network you are targeting to be sure your content fits their specifications. Here are what some of the most popular networks are recommending in the Fall of 2013:
Facebook
See their developer guide, Maximizing Distribution for Media Content – In particular, these points:
- Learn who your users are and what they want to share
- Make sure the Facebook Crawler can access your site
- Use proper Open Graph tags to drive distribution
- Use images that are at least 1200×630 pixels to generate great previews
- Use our debug tool to debug your Open Graph Tags
- Encourage your content creators to turn on Follow
LinkedIn
See their sharing documentation on Setting Display Tags for Shares. LinkedIn supports the same Open Graph tags as Facebook. They used to need larger images than Facebook, and their site still recommends a minimum 80×150 pixels, well below what you will need to have in place for Facebook now anyway. LinkedIn clears their image cache weekly, so changes you’ve made may not appear immediately (try just renaming file if you need an immediate change forcing LinkedIn to fetch a new image).
Twitter
Add a few lines of code to your site to make use of Twitter’s Twitter cards feature, which attaches media to Tweets that link to your content. Yoast’s SEO plugin can be configured to add Twitter card meta tags, but Twitter offers 8 varieties so you might want to customize them. According to their documentation:
“There are 8 Card types that can be attached to Tweets, each of which has a beautiful consumption experience built for Twitter’s web and mobile clients:
Summary Card: Default Card, including a title, description, thumbnail, and Twitter account attribution.
Summary Card with Large Image: Similar to a Summary Card, but offers the ability to prominently feature an image.
Photo Card: A Tweet sized photo Card.
Gallery Card: A Tweet Card geared toward highlighting a collection of photos.
App Card: A Tweet Card for providing a profile of an application.
App Installs and Deep-Linking: An extension to any Card that provides app download and deep linking.
Player Card: A Tweet sized video/audio/media player Card.
Product Card: A Tweet Card to better represent product content.
Read more about how to implement Twitter Cards here.
See their developer guide, Maximizing Distribution for Media Content – In particular, these points:
- Learn who your users are and what they want to share
- Make sure the Facebook Crawler can access your site
- Use proper Open Graph tags to drive distribution
- Use images that are at least 1200×630 pixels to generate great previews
- Use our debug tool to debug your Open Graph Tags
- Encourage your content creators to turn on Follow
See their sharing documentation on Setting Display Tags for Shares. LinkedIn supports the same Open Graph tags as Facebook. They used to need larger images than Facebook, and their site still recommends a minimum 80×150 pixels, well below what you will need to have in place for Facebook now anyway. LinkedIn clears their image cache weekly, so changes you’ve made may not appear immediately (try just renaming file if you need an immediate change forcing LinkedIn to fetch a new image).
Add a few lines of code to your site to make use of Twitter’s Twitter cards feature, which attaches media to Tweets that link to your content. Yoast’s SEO plugin can be configured to add Twitter card meta tags, but Twitter offers 8 varieties so you might want to customize them. According to their documentation:
“There are 8 Card types that can be attached to Tweets, each of which has a beautiful consumption experience built for Twitter’s web and mobile clients:
Summary Card: Default Card, including a title, description, thumbnail, and Twitter account attribution.
Summary Card with Large Image: Similar to a Summary Card, but offers the ability to prominently feature an image.
Photo Card: A Tweet sized photo Card.
Gallery Card: A Tweet Card geared toward highlighting a collection of photos.
App Card: A Tweet Card for providing a profile of an application.
App Installs and Deep-Linking: An extension to any Card that provides app download and deep linking.
Player Card: A Tweet sized video/audio/media player Card.
Product Card: A Tweet Card to better represent product content.
Read more about how to implement Twitter Cards here.
