In June 2017, Facebook quietly announced that it would begin removing some core functionality of its Graph API. And while many of the changes in version 2.9 were minor, the most notable to social marketers was the deprecation of the ability to edit previews attached to link posts, including the link headline, link description, and link image.
The reasoning behind this shift is fairly straightforward: Unscrupulous publishers can easily (and maliciously) misrepresent the underlying link content, fooling people into clicking on posts that are not representative of the destination material.
“We [Facebook] are eliminating a channel that has been abused to post false news.”
The Rise of Open Graph
Fast forward to December 2017. The end of the deprecation timetable has arrived and the ability to customize link previews for Pages is now dead. I remember the good old days... It used to be so easy to paste a link and then tweak it. But as of this post (12/19/2017) I now only have the ability to swap out the image. But it's not all bad; increasing trust in a platform that sees 2 billion monthly users can actually make our jobs easier in the long-run.
So how can we move forward? What can we do to make sure our link posts have the most impact? Well the answer is simple: Open Graph.
Facebook Open Graph
Open Graph is nothing new—it actually launched in 2010—and is basically just the connection that passes data from a website into Facebook. But in the context of link sharing, the implications are extremely important.
Now that link preview customization is gone, Facebook will pull all information directly from a destination URL using meta data called, you guessed it, Open Graph Tags. This data will then be used to build the post's headline, description, and image when it is shared on the platform.
The bottom line is that it is now more important than ever to ensure that the OG Tags on your website are populating correctly, because according to the documentation, if metadata is not available, a complete link preview with an image may not be generated. And who wants to share a link that looks like that?
Coping With the Death of Link Preview Customization
It's important to consider the two ways that content is shared on Facebook:
You (as the owner) share a link to your own website.
Someone else shares a link to your website.
With that in mind, there are two things you can do to guarantee that your link posts have the greatest impact.
First, Facebook is eager to support publishers and has included workarounds for those who "require" link preview customization. If you own your own website domain, follow these instructions to verify it with Facebook. This will restore link preview customization functionality for links that point to your own site (hooray!).
Second, use proper Open Graph Tags on your site's pages so that they all populate and clearly represent the content that is being shared. Then, when other people share your links, they won't even need to customize the preview since it will already be 100% correct.
Will this impact your social marketing efforts? Let me know in the comments.
