Tag Archives: facebook

How To Update Facebook Open Graph Cache

by Posted in Social
 

Have you ever tried to post a link to your content on Facebook only to realize that an image is missing or the description isn’t there?

Naturally, you go back to your edit your article and add the missing content. Then you head back to Facebook and try to post the link. What, Facebook still isn’t showing the new content? Why? It is caching the Open Graph data!

How can you get Facebook to update cache data on a link?

  1. Go to the Facebook Open Graph debugger (https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug)
  2. Enter the URL of your link and click Debug
    debugger-facebook-developers
  3. Verify that the updated content is being fetched by Facebook in the “Object Properties” area
  4. If the new content is there, return to Facebook to add your link

In my experience this process has updated the Open Graph cache on Facebook every time.

Disclaimer: this is not a documented process by Facebook.

What is Open Graph?

Learn more at http://opengraphprotocol.org/

Why is Pinterest so popular?

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There is certainly a lot of discussion going around about the new social media phenom called Pinterest. Some don’t get why or how it could be so popular. While others are just writing it off.

To me, their approach is genius. Just think back a few years when Facebook hit the scene. Everyone loved the pictures. And even today people spend hours a day looking at pictures posted by their friends AND frenemies. We’ve all seen the movie – Facebook started as a photo comparison site. (more…)

twitterfeed.com vs. dlvr.it

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I am currently in the process of evaluating two services that utilize an RSS feed to auto post my blog entries to Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. I am evaluating 3rd party services because I wasn’t looking for a WordPress plugin. Having too many plugins just increase the overhead in your WordPress site and can lead to sluggish performance.

twitterfeedMy search first took me towards twitterfeed.com. Twitterfeed is a great tool to use and works very well.  It incorporates some a solid feature set:

  • RSS check frequency
  • bit.ly integration
  • tracking
  • dashboard
  • include prefix and suffix text with post

For the past few weeks I have used Twitterfeed publish to Twitter and Facebook, but not LinkedIn. Since I am active on all 3 social media sites, the lack of LinkedIn was a shortcoming in this service.

dlvr.itThe next step in my journey led me to dlvr.it. Dlvr.it, currently in Beta, is a service very similar to Twitterfeed. It’s feature set includes:

  • ability to configure “Routes”
  • scheduling
  • RSS check frequency
  • bit.ly integration
  • tracking
  • dashboard
  • include prefix and suffix text with post
  • hashtag support
  • diverse set of social networks to publish on

The big advantage to me is posting to LinkedIn. I am active on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Relying on the WordPress widget on LinkedIn just isn’t reliable to distribute content. Many people utilize apps and feeds to monitor social media sites and that WordPress widget only showed on my profile page.

I will be kicking the tires on dlvr.it over the coming weeks and will follow up with a blog post on which service I prefer and why.