I have a couple of embedded YouTube videos which I have added Like buttons for. The titles were wrong the first time I tested the Like functionality.
Although the video titles have now been changed, the old titles are still showing up in a user's news feed when they click Like.
Is there a way to get Facebook to get the new titles of the page, or are the titles now cached forever?
You can use Facebook URL Debugger to refresh the data. This tool is ment for debugging open graph tags on webpages. It has nice side effect of updating Facebook cache of the debugged URL. Originally this tool was named Facebook URL Linter.
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The original method for sharing links with a custom image, text and link appears to have been stripped from Facebook. I for one would love to see them bring this back.
Here is my situtation. I have a Facebook tab that loads a page that is hosted under my hosteddomains.com. I setup a Facebook app to work with my Facebook tab. When I try to use the new "Share Dialog" if the link I want to share is not the same as the app domains then i get an error and I can't share the link. Am I doing something wrong or is this what they intended to do?
IF that's what they intended to do then there is no way that this will replace what sharer.php could do. I could be on any site and share any link with an image to Facebook and have it posted to my wall.
The question is if i am on facebook tab and i want to share a link (I want a dialog box with a custom photo, title, link, and summary) and allow my users to post this custom message to there Facebook status.
Maybe i am confused about how to accomplish this, but so far i am not having much luck.
I miss the good ole days when i could just construct a URL and that would give me the ability to share what i want to share. Twitter and Pinterest have these methods.
Here are some code examples of things that I've tried that did not work:
Option #1:
The url in this option goes to page that I created on hosteddomains.com that has the Open Graph Meta Tags in it. My idea was to share these pages from my server that will direct them back to my Facebook tab. The result I was getting from this method was seeing the title of the tab from my FB page and description. The reason turned out to be that if i set the og:url to my Facebook tab page, that's the page that would get scraped. That's not what i was expecting from this method. I thought it would take the meta tags from the page i shared and the url with it. Not take all of the info from url and ignore the meta tags.
<a href="https://www.facebook.com/sharer/sharer.php?u=[URL]"
target="_parent">SHARE ON FB</a></p>
Option #2:
Tried using Facebook Share Dialog. I had an interesting time with this one. I setup a new Facebook app. I tried the Facebook tab as the URL and also my custom url to the page that has custom open graph meta tags. The facebook app has two App Domains - hosteddomain.com and websiteA.com. I also created a Page Tab section. The page tab section loads the HTML page that was loaded in the tab we made for our facebook page. Issue with this method is I don't get a custom open graph options set from my php page. I'm picking up information from the facebook tab again. At least now the dialog box shows the name of the new app. I am limited in what i can share using this method. The url i share has to belong to the App Domains. In order to have multiple app domains, I had to make that Page Tab section and then add the second url to the App Domains field, otherwise i got a warning.
<a href="https://www.facebook.com/dialog/share?app_id=[appID]&display=popup&href=[url]
&redirect_uri=[url]&ref=s" target="_blank">SHARE THIS</a>
Option #3
The last thing I tried was the fb-share-button using the Javascript SDK. I get the same result as option #1. I don't think there is much difference between these two. Option 3 here is a bit easier to deal with and cleaner code. In this example, the url is to my custom page on hosteddomains.com that has my custom open graph meta tags. That doesnt seem to matter though. It still pulls the info from the og:url meta tag. I tried removing the og:url meta tag. I get the same result. Is it the Page Tab info interfering?
<div class="fb-share-button" data-href="[url]"></div>
OK, I have the standard Facebook Like code.
But we are ajaxing in Tumblr posts from the Tumblr feed and putting the FB Like button in.
So we are LIKING the Tumblr post URL.
However the page is not on a Tumbler URL, so FB momentarilly shows the comments box, then replaces it with a Confirm button, which triggers a popup. Like in the popup, then it allows you to use the normal JS comment that should appear on the button.
QA and UI have flagged this up as unacceptable, so is this a massive UI failing by FB? Whatever it is, and how can I get around it?
If we LIKE a unique URL on our site/domain this works as intended;
BUT THEN we would have to write a backend to receive that URL and present OG tags for FB to scrape, probably grabbing from the tumblr post.
Yes, by default the Like plugin it will search the page for og:metadata,
to go forward you can use the new build in, Open Graph Like Action
http://developers.facebook.com/docs/opengraph/actions/builtin/likes/
So, now you can associate each Open Graph object with a like.
I like the share button more than the like button, thats why i'm using it. The problem is that if the title of the page change and when someone paste it into facebook is still with the old title
Sample code
I put span with a tag in the bottom of the page
http://www.facebook.com/share.php?u=http://stackoverflow.com
Using the share functionality is not a good decision since it has been deprecated and is no longer supported, as it clearly states here:
The Share button has been deprecated in favor of the Like button, and
will no longer be supported. Please use the Like button whenever
possible to drive maximum traffic to your apps.
And here:
What happened to the old Share button?
We deprecated the Share Button when we launched the Like button,
because the Like button improves clickthrough rates by allowing users
to connect with one click, and by allowing them to see which of their
friends have already connected.
With that said, to answer your question, it also written in the Like Button guide:
When does Facebook scrape my page?
Facebook needs to scrape your page to know how to display it around
the site.
Facebook scrapes your page every 24 hours to ensure the properties are
up to date. The page is also scraped when an admin for the Open Graph
page clicks the Like button and when the URL is entered into the
Facebook URL Linter. Facebook observes cache headers on your URLs - it
will look at "Expires" and "Cache-Control" in order of preference.
However, even if you specify a longer time, Facebook will scrape your
page every 24 hours.
The user agent of the scraper is: "facebookexternalhit/1.1
(+http://www.facebook.com/externalhit_uatext.php)"
To clear the cache the easiest thing is to just use the Debug Tool.
I want a Like button on my web site that Likes my Facebook profile (rather than my web page), so that when a user clicks it they subscribe to my Facebook posts.
I've created the Like button using the tool at https://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/plugins/like/
Further down that page there is an FAQ entry:
Can I link the Like button to my Facebook page?
Yes. Simply specify the URL of your Facebook page in the href
parameter of the button.
So, I've edited the href parameter to point to my Facebook page. eg:
https://www.facebook.com/myfacebookid
When a user clicks the Like button it has the desired effect. The user ends up having Liked my Facebook page. This is easily verified by the user going to my Facebook profile and checking that the Like button has changed to Liked.
But. When the user clicks the Like button, and entry appears in their News Feed with a generic Facebook description. ie:
Facebook is a social utility that connects people with friends and
others who work, study and live around them. People use Facebook to
keep up with friends, upload an unlimited number of photos, post links
and videos, and learn more about the people they meet.
I don't want a generic post about Facebook to appear. I want the description to relate to my Facebook account and/or web site.
Normally, I could modify this behavior with the Opengraph og: description tag, but as the page in the href is a Facebook page and not my own, I can't control the Opengraph tags.
I'm pretty sure that this was working okay before I enabled timeline for my account, so maybe this is a timeline bug?
So, how do I add a Like button which a) Likes my Facebook profile rather than one of my own web pages, and b) Posts a description of my Facebook profile rather than give a generic Facbook description?
Are all your fields in the info part of your page filled in, and/or completed? I just tested your theory and it seemed to work as expected, only thing is I know all fields in "info" are filled it. Give that a try.
This may happen if you have filled invalid/incomplete/wrong og tags in past and later changed them. Facebook's cache creates problem sometime.
Try putting all the entries (i.e. all og tags) and then debug them here http://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug. This debugger gives a detailed info about the url with og tags and also clears the cache for you.
This should solve the problem.
You have 3 important fields that used on page opengraph: Name,Description,Profile Image.
They are used when some one post your link on Facebook, or Google or some else web service that handle opengraph.
Actually, the suggested answers currently do not work and there is an open bug / ticket on Facebook for it. Up to now, there's no fix.
The problem is that you can not use simply https://www.facebook.com/myfacebookid. You should copy and paste the exact page URL. If you have a low number of likes it would look something like https://www.facebook.com/pages/[YourPageName]/[Your page Id]/, and this is the URL that you should use at this point.
If it does not work, try also https://www.facebook.com/[YourPageName]/[Your page Id]/.
In short, copy-paste the URL, do not type it manually.
I am currently working on a rebranding with my company, and I am having some issues with the thumbnails which are appearing next to the facebook posts when someone shares our website. The issue is that our old logo is still appearing in the thumbnail image, and not our new one - not ideal. Is there an easy way of updating the choice of these thumbnails to give the choice of our new logo?
Make sure you have the correct OpenGraph og:tags in your HTML markup and use the Facebook Debugger to scrape your URL and refresh Facebook's caching of your URL; it will show you what metadata Facebook can see for your URL.