Facebook share is widely used these days to share web pages people like, on their profile. The sharing mechanism is quite simple, fetches the related image and excerpt from the url being shared to ensure that the person seeing the post gets an idea of what the shared page is about. A webdesigner has control over how the webpage will look when shared on facebook. How to control what image and text shows up when your page is shared is explained here.
This post is focused on how to test exactly what your page will look like, even the minor details. Facebook has a very simple tool for this called URL Linter.
Just paste the URL of the page to be tested and facebook will fetch the title, description/excerpt, image, the link shown with the post, and any other meta properties on the page. This is extremely helpful for any page which is expected to be shared alot on fb, so that it can be tested before making it public. Another advantage of using this url linter is that once you make changes to your page and try the linter it will go for the latest version and not show the cached copy while normal facebook share will show a cached copy for a url that has been shared previously.
I hope this post gives you an edge while using Facebook share.
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8 replies on “How will a page show up on Facebook Share.”
Thank you! That facebook cache was driving me crazy! I thought it was something else that I was doing wrong. Thank you so much – I really appreciate you. Jacqui
I am glad it was helpful. :)
Hi bro.
I get a terrible trouble. My old fan page appear in the search results. But i have another fan page now with another url, but the same name. I have made my new fan page with de face’s tool “the migration” from profile to fan page, and it was very silly, i know, but i need one solution to keep my position with my new fan page and so del the older. I need some instruccions for proceed for get del the results from my older fan page in the instant results. Thanks 4 u help bro.
Hi can yo please help with linter:
http://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/og/object?q=gotfolks.com%2Fvideo%2F424%2Fstrickly
its showing missing titles etc but if we look at the source of that page its all there:
http://gotfolks.com/video/424/strickly
Thanks.
I was too having issues with Facebook cache.
Thanks :)
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Hi There, i am having problems with uploading my url link, it still caching my old web address, i have tried the debugger tool, still no joy. Any ideas.
did you try adding some cache busters to your url?