I built a page at the following URL http://s2r.ca/helpmetest that had been shared a couple of times. When I viewed the Facebook Graph API stats on the page it showed that the page had 2 shares.
I then proceeded to add Open Graph tags to the page so that when the page is shared a specific image, title and description would be displayed. Since adding these tags, when I view the Graph API stats, the 'shares' key is missing from the result set.
Looking at the graph debugger, other than a warning that my image needs to be at least 200px x 200 px (which is it ~600 x ~300, unless it wants the image to be square, but it pulls the image anyways and the Share box also pulls it when clicking the Facebook button from the website), there aren't any errors.
So I'm a little confused as to why the counts have gone missing.
Since then, I have shared the site at the following 2 urls:
http://s2r.ca/helpmetest
http://s2r.ca/helpmetest/0
and the Graph API request still doesn't return any shares
http://graph.facebook.com/http://s2r.ca/helpmetest
http://graph.facebook.com/http://s2r.ca/helpmetest/0
Does anyone have any insight as to why?
Related
We use the Facebook Share option on a website with newsarticles. The website is build with PHP and uses Smarty. We generate a unique URL (stripped like /news/headline-of-the-article) and have the meta properties defined.
When the owner shares a links with an image that was previously uploaded, everything is fine. When he uploads a news image, inserts it into the article and shares, Facebook takes another pictures, the pictures that it finds first on the source-code. Altho, in the preview-box just before you publish, it shows the correct image. Once placed, it's the wrong one.
The Facebook Debug Tool shows as og:image tag > og:image domain/UserFiles/images/news/standard_14.jpg
But when I look at the RAW tags og:image shows > domain/UserFiles/images/news/bosuil_1.jpg
So the og:image tag does it job and generates the correct URL, but facebook still posts the wrong image. When I force Facebook (manually) to scrape again, it shows everything good and also shares it correct.
I don't get it...
I had the same problem and found these best practices on facebook's developer wiki: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/sharing/best-practices#precaching
Use og:image:width and og:image:height Open Graph tags
Using these tags will specify the image dimensions to the crawler so that it can
render the image immediately without having to asynchronously download
and process it.
After specifying the width and height we have not had a problem with facebook crawling the right picture immediately.
My goal is to post to my FB page (/{page-id}/feed) a link to a website, choosing the image to show instead of the picture scraped automatically from the web page. The image I'd like to show is not in the web page, so I cannot use the og:image tag.
I'm using the current API (v2.9) and this is what I've tried so far in the Graph API Explorer:
the picture parameter, that does not work as expected (it doesn't replace the automatic image)
picture and link parameters both pointing to the image url, with an action button, but it must have the same url used for the link parameter
the child_attachments parameter, but I need at least 2 images and the final result is quite different, too
additional fields of the link parameter, but thy were removed in the 2.9 API
a lot of combinations between these parameters, with no luck
What am I missing?
For information regarding why it isn't working. I assume they removed it to force users to add it to their website like Twitter did with their Twitter cards and maybe to stop impersonating pages.
https://developers.facebook.com/docs/sharing/reference/feed-dialog#deprecated-params
I'm trying to get Facebook to show its image picker tool when a user shares a page that has multiple image choices.
Here's a typical page on the site:
unionsquareevents [dot] com/catering/sourcing/
(I guess I don't have enough rep points yet to post this as a link)
I have multiple og:image meta tags defined. The site runs on https, so I've also included og:image:secure_url meta tags. The images are all > 200px x 200px.
I've read this post, though it was written in 2011:
How does Facebook Sharer select Images and other metadata when sharing my URL? And many others that echo it, though none from recent months / years.
I've run it through Facebook's debugger. There are no errors, all the right meta tags are shown in the 'raw tags we found' section, and all the images are rendering in the og:image field of the '...we constructed the following Open Graph properties' section:
screenshot 1 of FB debugger results
screenshot 2 of FB debugger results
The scraped source shows all the goods as well, plus the og:url tag using https.
I'm starting to wonder if this is just no longer available in 2015? I can't find anything anywhere on their docs site about the image picker.
I've seen this is a common issue here on stack but it seems that the answer is always dependent on the specific scenario. I'm looking for a fellow coder to give me that "AHA" moment.
Problem: Ads posted to my website do not show the og:image content when shared to facebook until the ad is shared at least 4 times
I have thought about/ tried the following things
Checking the image size to make sure it's not large (128kb) is the norm. I compress all uploads.
Giving the ad some time to marinate before sharing (perhaps the fb crawler takes a while to cache the page)
I tried using the debug crawler tool on fb to see if I could reproduce the problem and I indeed could.
I tried sharing the ad to my own page regardless of the missing image to see if the image showed up on my wall. It did not.
The image will not show up on ANY shares until someone has clicked on the share icon on an ad at least 4 times. It seems to me like it might be some latency issue on facebook's part.
What could cause og:image to only show on subsequent share clicks?
Edit
Here's a test ad.
https://www.jdmxchange.com/Classifieds/Details/6ae72690-14d8-4bab-b039-3a2d79923794
Reading https://developers.facebook.com/docs/sharing/best-practices I found this, which might be just what you're looking for:
Use og:image:width and og:image:height Open Graph tags
Using these tags will specify the image to the crawler so that it can render it immediately without having to asynchronously.
This means, if you set the width and height of your og:image with tags, the image will show straight away.
UPDATE
Actually debugging your URL shows like this URL is redirecting to another page, and then another. Which makes me suspect the Facebook crawler is not able to access the actual OG meta tags you're using.
As a random test, I would add OG metatags to that last URL and see if Facebook uses them. But the actual solution would be to use URLs which are actually reachable to FB (no credentials necessary).
I have simple product pages populated with facebook open graph metadata. I've tested against the fb debugger and its being scraped successfully by fb. eg. http://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/og/object?q=http%3A%2F%2Fshort.stylemology.com%2F1058
If I do a facebook share, from my pc, facebook shows the correct metadata on the sharing page, but when viewing the shared item on a wall, it points back to the simple product url rather than the full product url specified in og:url, but it still uses the og, description & image.
Mobile behaviour is even more erratic. Neither the url nor the description get used, but the correct image is displayed.
I've viewed the source on the mobile page and it is still being correctly populated with the open graph metadata.
Extremely confused and would appreciate any insight into this behaviour because my attempt to research this issues have come up dry.
Example simple product page:
http://short.stylemology.com/1058
thanks in advance for your feedback.