Optimising on Facebook with the Open Graph Protocol

Social media optimisation, particularly on Facebook, is not something you should take lightly. We all know the power of word-of-mouth; well these days that means the power of sharing on social sites via wall posts and the like button.

Facebook users can easily share any content they like on their wall by simply uploading a photo, video, or just pasting a link. However, lots of people do not do this even if they visit a page they like simply because it doesn’t cross their mind to do so, or don’t want to take the extra step of copying the URL and pasting it on their wall.

A good way to encourage people to share your page on Facebook is simply by adding the Like button on your page and configuring it using Open Graph Protocol tags so that it will show more information once posted on Facebook. Sure, a simple link showing on someone’s post is better than nothing, but since the goal is to entice as many users as you can to click on that link it means that you have to optimise that link to do just that.

The great thing about Open Graph tags is that it will allow you to tell Facebook how you want your content’s link to be structured when shared by someone on their wall. You can specify the exact details you want to appear, from the title to an image and description.

As you can see below, the link I shared going to the Bailey’s fundraising page in Just Giving is a lot more enticing to click on than it would have been if it appeared as this a simple non-descriptive link. At the portion labelled number one, you can see how the Open Graph tags also put in important details including the page title, a short description, and an image on the left.

It is also evident that the payoff for optimising on Facebook is evident because fellow users seeing the link have four actionable courses, which are to click on the link itself, to Like the post (number 2 portion of the image), re-share it on their own wall (number 3 portion of the image), and to comment on the post.

Click on the link to learn more about the Open Graph protocol tags and how to use it to turn your pages into graph objects.

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