People get excited about fancy 'code' = and that's great.
But you know what's also great? The boring stuff.
When you share your website... it can look like this:
But that's not very exciting. The website might be the coolest website in the world... but the point here - is that you want to give people trust in the link - and also make it seem exciting or serious or whatever story you want to tell - so that they'll engage. This just picks up the favicon and the URL. (url)
Or it can look like this:
At least this one has the page title. (url)
Or it can look like this:
This one has open-graph metadata for 'title' and 'description' and an 'image.' This is an example in a text-message, but this stuff is what would be used on all the social networks - so, you might as well just cover your bases. This is a generic bit of information though. (url)
or it can look like this:
This is a targeted message that tells the person exactly what they want them to know - and gives them a call to action. Right in their messaging app! This might mean more to the success of your company - than the actual website. Maybe your website just has a phone number on it. (url)
So - why does it matter? Are you sure? Isn't that just some boring HTML stuff?
No.
Our friend Arthur Jones: futuresmells.com/ and a bunch of other people just spent 3 whole years of their lives making a documentary with Matt Furie.
The trailer is out today and everyone is working hard to share it and make it a success - and so we send it around to our friends and it looks like this:
If you're going to spend 3 years of all-day every-day passion project lifestyle / then you gotta make sure your developer spends 10 minutes to get the messages down for each page on the website and make sure that that rich sharing data is A+.
People say it doesn't matter... but - well, are we crazy? Doesn't it?
What makes you want to learn more? This?
Or this:
Of course we've alerted them - and so if you check out the site - it might be updated... but almost no one listens to us - so, we'll just have to check back and see.
metadata matters. It especially matter during covid. We've got some more writing about that over here: https://perpetual.education/content-strategy-and-covid-19/
UPDATE 1
Not just any image will do. This .png for example - from the website, has no background!
The go-to image size is 1200x630, but we usually double that in our graphics editor. (2400x1260)
and you also need to really check with the facebook debugger: https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.feelsgoodmanfilm.com%2F to see how it works... and really double check on devices like phones to make sure that the text is readable.
For example:
might have the feet cut off - but the words will be legible on the smallest screens.
Top comments (2)
Now more than ever having rich metadata is crucial to immersing users with your content. Linking is becoming more and more important as there are more platforms than ever before. People don’t like clicking a bland link as much as clicking one with a big thumbnail.
The original meta VS your example are like night and day! if your metadata isnt rich in (the right kind of!) info, you're leaving alot of opportunity on the table!
great article :)