Creation-1

We recently had quite the experience battle with Facebook Open Graph Protocol.  From here on out we will refer to it as OGP.

Okay so what is it?

Well, to make a long answer as short as possible, OGP is a series of tags you can use in the metadata of your web pages to help push info to Facebook and make sharing more seamless between your website and Facebook.

How will I use it?

Most people use OGP tags on their website and blog posts to tell Facebook what descriptions, titles, and images to use when a user shares your content on Facebook.  There are many other advanced ways of pushing other OGP tags to Facebook.  You can learn here about more advanced uses: http://developers.facebook.com/docs/opengraph/

How do I implement Open Graph Tags?

If you are working in a CMS like WordPress, don’t bother entering your tags manually.  There are plenty of plugins to help you out with this.  If you need to enter the tags manually it’s pretty easy.  Go here and paste in the tags above the </head> tag in the HTML of your page.  Then just make sure to edit the metadata appropriately for your URL and info.

How do I check my work?

To make sure Facebook is reading your OGP tags go to the Facebook URL Linter and enter the URL of the page you entered the tags on.  The URL linter will catch any errors in your metadata and display the data you are pushing to Facebook.  Edit the OGP tags so that no erorrs are returned on the URL linter.

What else should I know?

• You need a unique URL to share an item on Facebook.  If you have a slideshow that does not display unique URL’s for each item, you cannot share slides from your slideshow.
• Keep in mind when you are testing your work that the title becomes fixed after you share something 50 times. So, if you are testing a URL too much and are not seeing any changes, that’s why.
• Also, sometimes the URL linter has to refresh its’ cache so don’t be impatient.  If you change something, and it’s not displaying in the URL linter, check your work.  If you are sure you did everything right, wait.  Log in tomorrow and enter the URL again.  Everything should be fine.

I would love to hear about your experience with Facebook Open Graph Tags.  Do you have any tips of your own to add?

What can I say?  There really is no excuse.  It’s a small shop here a C-1.  We concentrate quite heavily on face to face human- type networking and we have been plotting and planning how we would shape our image via social media.  We have come a long way in 5 years as a company and we are just getting to that point where we want to announce ourselves to the world!  Most of our time is spent connecting with people in real life and listening to their ideas. This is what we have prided ourselves on over the past few years.  We understand that people have had bad experiences working with people in this industry.  We know that web developers are typically hard to contact, never answer the phone, disappear near deadlines, and work strange hours.  That’s why we always tell people to call us.  We will pick up the phone, we will answer you on Skype or iChat, we will respond to your email by the next business day, and we will always return carrier pigeons promptly- weather permitting.

This is where Facebook comes in.  We will use it more to connect with people and share our ideas, not so much for promotion.  We understand that most people are not interested in our rather geektastic pursuits which is why our FB page will likely be promoting other peoples projects and highlighting what we think is shaping our future landscape in society.  Because let’s face it, web development now affects every aspect of our lives.

With that said, enjoy our musings and the occasional stupid joke and “Like” us in the right sidebar of the blog.

We were privileged to work with Tolis Dimopoulos at The Neighborhood Entrepreneur  to help him make his blog more dynamic and integrated with Social Media.  We updated his header and helped integrate an improved Twitter feed into his sidebar.  The blog posts also present the opportunity to Retweet on Twitter or Like on Facebook.  Take a look for yourself, you may just learn something!  TheNeighborhoodEntrepreneur.com

I found a great article at the Mills Communications Group blog about the importance of listening when engaging in marketing through social media.  I agree that this is a very important task that should take place daily, weekly and monthly.  Before you just go blabbing and shamelessly promoting yourself have a listen.

Read the article titled-  Listening: The First Step To Social Networking Success