Facebook Share/Like Default Image, Title, Description text

Question

We are making use of the FB Like/Share functionality on various pages for our client's site(s). On each page we want shared, we add the following in the meta tags:

<head id="ctl00_Head1">
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
<meta http-equiv="Expires" content="0" />
<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=8" />

    <!-- social sharing metadata -->
    <meta property="og:title" content="Our Site Title" />
<meta property="og:description" content="A description to be used in the share dialog." />
<meta property="og:image" content="http://us.oursite.com/images/FB_ShareThumbnail_US.png" />

    <title>Our Page Title</title>

    <!-- favicon -->
    <!-- stylesheet and js links -->
    <!-- inline js -->
</head>

In addition, we also display a Facebook graphic with the following HREF:

<A href="http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=http%3a%2f%2fus.oursite.com%2fOurPage.aspx%3fid%3d999&amp;t=Our+Site+Title" target=_blank><IMG src="/images/Facebook_icon_20x20.png"></A>

The client would like a standard Image, Title, Description used, regardless of the actual page\article shared (sort of "brand control"). We currently have our og: meta tags setup to render down the same data for each page/article.

When the users click the "share" functionality, they don't get a page/article picture, nor any good description or title (as i thought the tags were supposed to provide).

The pages currently being shared are accessible to anonymous users, so the FB bot can access the pages. The image specified in the og meta tag is also available to anonymous users. The first question is why does this method of sharing not seem to use the correct defaults for sharing??

The next question is, the next feature request is to have authenticated pages be able to be shared with the same default image, title, description. I was approaching this from a server perspective, where I'd look for the FB bot and redirect the bot to a "static" page that contains only the minimal markup needed to extract the image, title, description. I've proofed this and it works pretty well. I just feel like it might be a bit complicated. Wondering if there is a "better" or more "best-practive" way to share authenticated pages and have the share functionality know about our standard image, title, description??

Thanks In Advance!

Update: I found this related Q/A on StackOverflow: Facebook Share doesn't show my description or my thumbnail

When I ask "Wondering if there is a "better" or more "best-practive" way to share authenticated pages and have the share functionality know about our standard image, title, description??", this is the type of thing I am talking about. If I can pass all data needed to the Facebook sharer.php via querystring parameters (and this results in no Facebook scraper action needed/taken), that is ideal, then I don't need to write any server side logic to re-route the Facebook scraper. I tried taking the Url provided in the above noted Q/A, reformat with my data, but no luck. Wondering if this is documented somewhere on FB?

Niklas Niklas · Accepted Answer · 2011-07-19T20:36:19

There can be a number of reasons why it isn't using the provided og meta data, but unless you share us the code/url we can just guess what might be the issue.

Make sure the og metadata resides inside the <head> tag as it won't be looking for them anywhere else. If you define them in the <body> tag or some other place, it will just ignore them.
If the pages have been liked before you added the metadata, you need to refresh the cache Facebook has for the page by providing the url's to the Facebook linter tool.

If neither of those steps resolve the problem, please share the url/code.

As far as your question regarding authenticated pages goes, you could just add that metadata on the public, non-authenticated version of the page, without checking is it actually Facebook or not, as when someone shares the page, that same information becomes public regardless of the users who view the share have access to the page or not.

Facebook Share/Like Default Image, Title, Description text

3 Answers