4 Elements of Successful Facebook Optimization
Did you know Facebook is the busiest website on the internet? Millions of people from all over the world access Facebook. Even Google has felt threatened and pushed out their social media site Google Plus. If you have trouble getting traffic from search engines then you should optimize your site to succeed on Facebook and other Social media sites.
Have the Prefect Thumbnail
When you post your link on Facebook, or a visitor likes your page a small thumbnail image is posted along with a description of your website. In studies it has been proven that a good thumbnail image will generate more clicks than a poor image. Like the saying goes an images is worth a thousand words, take advantage of this and give Facbook a nice logo or image that explains what your website is
about. Facebook crops the image to fit, the suggested size for optimal image quality is 200px by 200px. It is best to leave a 10px border around the image for better visibility and takes cropping adjustments into account.
Control your Description and Titles
Facebook does its best at sharing your websites information but whenever you have the option to control what Facebook posts you should always do so.
Want to know what Facebook shows as an image and description currently? You can check your pages here: URL Linter – Facebook Developers
(don’t only do your homepage, try your internal pages as well)
A few simple lines of code will add the description, title and image that you want Facebook to post when your links are shared. For WordPress websites this can be done with just a few clicks of a mouse. We use this WordPress Plugin to help optimize our site for Facebook. You can install this “Facebook Open Graph Meta in WordPress” plugin
For static sites you will need to add the following code to every page of your website;
First your HTML tag needs some additions
New Code:
xmlns:og=”http://ogp.me/ns#”
xmlns:fb=”http://www.facebook.com/2008/fbml”
Existing Code:
<html xmlns=”http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml”>
Becomes:
Code:
<html xmlns=”http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml”
xmlns:og=”http://ogp.me/ns#”
xmlns:fb=”http://www.facebook.com/2008/fbml”>
Next the meta tags:
ADD Code:
<meta property=”og:title” content=”PAGE TITLE”/>
<meta property=”og:type” content=”MEDIA TYPE (article,movie, etc.)”/>
<meta property=”og:url” content=”THE SITE URL”/>
<meta property=”og:image” content=”LINK TO PAGE IMAGE”/>
<meta property=”og:site_name” content=”SITE NAME”/>
<meta property=”fb:admins” content=”USER_ID”/>
<meta property=”og:description” content=”PAGE DESCRIPTION”/>
Add the Like button – Social Media Plugins
When optimizing for facebook it is a MUST to have the Facebook Like button somewhere on your page. Facebook makes this very easy with their Social Plugins – Facebook Developers section. Facebook will create the code for you to post onto your site. You can also find some great plugins for WordPress that we have also found helpful.
Facebook Fan Page Optimization
Just like the “Facebook like buttons” you will want to create a facebook page for your website. When a person becomes a fan of your page they will be shown every post you make on your page on their news feed. So you post the link to your article on your Facebook page wall, now people who like your page, and all their friends will be exposed to your content. This can have a very exponential effect, the more people you get to become a fan of your facebook page the more people that will be exposed to your content and brand name. You can also add fan page like buttons to you site that you can find here; Social Plugins – Facebook Developers. We encourage readers to give us some like love and join out fan page seen on the right had column of this page.
This is still just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Facebook optimization but it is a great start that will put you ahead of your competition. For more information of questions leave us a comment bellow
