Updating Facebook share description, title, and image

Acoustic Campaign publishes a share-to-social version of an email that can be shared on Facebook between friends and followers. This page includes the content that is shared and is "scraped" to determine how the description, title, and preview images display.

About this task

Facebook uses the Open Graph protocol to add hidden data to their Web pages that, when shared on a social networking site, populate the pages with specified text or images. You can add the Open Graph information in your email template to tell Facebook how to handle an email because Acoustic Campaign pushes the code in that template to the share-to-social version.

Add to the <head> section of the web page the meta information that conveys the open graph tags. To tell Facebook how to share a page, place the following code in the <head> section of the email template:

<html>
     <head>
          <meta property='og:title' content='Here's the title of my share!'/>
          <meta property='og:image' content='https://www.google.com/intl/en_com/images/srpr/logo3w.png'/>
          <meta property='og:description' content='Here's a description for Facebook that will show as a block of text!'/>

For Share to Social, Acoustic Campaign creates a tracking redirect URL over the Facebook share link that tells Acoustic Campaign reporting who clicked what when. This URL redirects to a link such as the following example:

https://www.facebook.com/sharer/sharer.php?u=http://google.com/

The first part of the link tells Facebook that you want to share something. The part after u= is the URL that Facebook is to share. Acoustic Campaign creates a link that has the Facebook Sharer URL and appends the location of the Acoustic Campaign S2S published page like the following example:

https://www.facebook.com/sharer/sharer.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fcontenta.mkt1042.com%2Fmson%2F2011%2F12%2F07%2FRFPK9wxCPNfc%2Findex.html

Acoustic Campaign URL encodes everything after u=, according to the instructions from Facebook. Facebook Sharer goes to that page and figures out what you want shared or decides for you. If Facebook sees the Open Graph tags, it uses those tags. If Facebook isn't told what to do, it tries to determine what you want.

If Facebook doesn't display the share as you believe it should, complete the following steps. You need the sent email that contains the share link, and you must log in to Facebook.

Procedure

  1. Click the Share-to-Social Facebook link.

    The browser address bar displays the Facebook Sharer URL with the Acoustic Campaign email appended after u=.

  2. Highlight and copy the encoded URL, starting with the http.
  3. On the Facebook Debugger website, paste the URL in the Input URL field and click Debug.
    The Object Properties for the page displays.
  4. Click Fetched URL.
    This URL is the published share-to-social version of the email that Facebook scrapes.
  5. Go to the source code of the page. If it does not have the open graph <meta> tags in the <HEAD> section of the source code, Facebook guesses what to place for the preview image, title, and description. This causes issues if you want to have control over their message and because the information that is shared by default is misleading.