What Does Facebook Know About the Links You Share?
Have you ever wanted to see how well links performed in the past on Facebook? Have you ever posted a link to Facebook and the picture is too small or the text is completely different? Facebook offers a great, free tool that lets you preview a link and tells you what the platforms knows about the link.
Read on to find out what Facebook knows about the links you share:
The Tool
Facebook itself has written that “people often prefer to click on links that are displayed in the link format (which appears when you paste a link while drafting a post), rather than links that are buried in photo captions”. This means that links are one of the most important ways you’re sharing content on Facebook, and, therefore, knowing exactly what Facebook knows about your link is crucial. Luckily, they provide a tool that lets you know exactly what they know about your link: the Sharing Debugger.
What the Tool Shows You
The Preview
It will show you exactly what the link will look like on desktop before you post it.
Likes, Shares, and Comments on Facebook
That’s right. Facebook tracks how many likes, shares, and comments every link gets and stores it for future reference. One of the many reasons you’ll find this tool is useful!
Other Info About Your Facebook Links
The Facebook Sharing Debugger will also pull the URL, title, description, type, tags, site name, author, publisher, and locale from the link, as well as the last time it was updated.
How it Works
The tool identifies information about a link in a very similar to the way that looking at someone’s driver’s license can tell you their age, eye color, and height. When you copy the URL into the Sharing Debugger, it will pull data. Instead of a card, Facebook, along with every other social media site, uses code included in websites called “OG Meta Tags”.
For instance, just like if you have brown eyes, your driver’s license might say “EYES BRN”, if the title of your blog is “How to Natively Schedule Posts on Instagram”, the code simply will say “og:title” and “How to Natively Schedule Posts on Instagram”.
Why is this Significant?
On face value alone, the information the tool shows you is extremely valuable. You can adjust to make sure your link is set up for success and it allows you to see what picture will be used and how it will look. If you see that it has very little engagement in the past, it’s worth refreshing the photo, title, and description – and possibly the content, too!
How to Use this Information
Ensure the Information is Correct
The first thing to do is ensure the information is correct. Ask yourself:
- Is the picture what it should be?
- Is it an image that will perform well?
- Are both the “title” and “description” accurate?
- Is the “type” appropriate?
- If it’s a blog, make sure it says “article”.
- Do the tags make sense?
- For instance, if it’s a winter activities landing page, you want to make sure “summer fun” isn’t tagged.
- Is the site name right?
- Does the locale say “en_us”?
- This means that it’s in English, and its country of origin is the United States.
Optimization
The next step is optimizing the Facebook link. If the picture is too small or generic, swap it out! Make sure the title, or headline, is interesting and actionable. Next month, we’ll dive deeper into the subject of optimizing your links.
How to Change Your Preview
The easiest way to change what your link preview looks like is to talk to your webmaster. However, you might be able to do it yourself, as most website platforms have “Featured Image”, “Title”, and other similar options in the editor.
Want to Do Some Coding?
However, if you’re able to add some code to the “header” section of a single page, Meta Tags is a tool that can be used to debug and generate the Open Graph code for any website. With Meta Tags, you can experiment and edit your content, then preview how your webpage will look on Google, Facebook, Twitter and other sites.
Conclusion
Link-type posts are the best way to drive traffic to your website from Facebook, and this tool gives you an insider look into the social media platform’s data so you can optimize your link for success. If you’re looking for new ways to stay updated on destination marketing, be sure to subscribe to our e-newsletter or follow us across social media at the links below!
Why Your Website Needs to Be Faster
We expect rapid results in our everyday lives. Nowadays, we have practically unlimited amounts of information at our fingertips. Consequently, if your site doesn’t load fast enough on mobile, users will go somewhere else. It’s that simple. But how fast, is “fast enough”? Read on to learn why your website needs to be faster:
What Load Time Looks Like
We slowed down our website’s load time to give a sense of how long 10 seconds is on the internet. If you were scrolling on Facebook and clicked a link, how long would you wait for it to load?
Case Studies on Site Speed
- The BBC found that for every additional second a page on their website takes to load, 10% of users leave.
- Google Think found that a 1s delay in page load times can affect mobile conversions by up to 20% on retail sites.
- Outdoor clothing company Dakine cut the load time of its pages by at least 48% and had mobile traffic increase by 31% and mobile revenue increase by 45%.
- When Pfizer made their sites’ load times 38% faster, their bounce rate decreased by 20%.
- A private telecom company, Telefónica improved load times for its mobile site by 70%, which helped increase click-through rate by 31%.
It’s impossible to be engaged by content that you can’t see.
Why It Matters
- 1 out of 2 users expect a page to load in less than 2 seconds.
- DoubleClick by Google discovered that 53% of visits are likely to be abandoned if pages take longer than 3 seconds to load.
At TwoSix Digital, we see tourism websites with at least 50% of web visits coming from mobile and, typically, it accounts for about 60-70% of traffic. This number is growing every year. This is why it’s imperative to ensure that your website is quick enough to keep users interested.
Above, you can watch that same video with drop-off statistics based on load times.
How to Test Your Site
Each web page on your website is different. Each has its own pictures, information, and features. A great way to see the load times of pages on your website is with Google Analytics’ site speed tool. Google also offers an easy “Test My Site” tool that analyzes different URLs and reports on mobile speed. If you want to see exactly where your page is slowing down, then check out WebPageTest,.
How Fast Should Your Website Be?
If a slow mobile experience drives customers away, a fast mobile experience can help attract and keep them.
think with Google
We recommend keeping your page load times to under 3 seconds, and try to have at least one thing visible on your screen, such as a menu or image within the 1st second.
How Do I Make My Website Faster?
The first step is to contact your developer and tell them your benchmarks – specifically for mobile. While desktop speed is important, mobile site speed is paramount. Compressing images and text, along with employing a technique called “lazy loading“, are good places to start. If you want to go a bit more in depth, check out these recommendations.
Today, site speed is one of the important aspects of a website, and comes into play before content is ever seen. Consequently, it will always affect how effective your digital marketing will be, and should be considered a priority. If you’re looking for new ways to stay updated on destination marketing, be sure to subscribe to our e-newsletter or follow us across social media at the links below!
How to Find Great User-Generated Content
(And what to do when you find it!)
User-Generated Content (UGC) is a huge part of tourism marketing. People are constantly posting images during their travels, which provides great opportunities for DMOs to repost this content on their own channels to promote and inspire tourism. In this blog, you’ll learn the best ways to find great UGC on Instagram and what to do when you find it.
Tagged Images
Some users make it super simple by tagging you in their photos, so the first place to start is looking at the images you’re tagged in! Navigate to the “tagged photos” portion in your Instagram profile to see what you’ve been tagged in. A best practice is to check-in on this a few times a week (at least) to make sure that you’re not missing out on any impressive content.
Check Your Hashtag For User-Generated Content
Did you know that you can search your hashtag on Instagram to see all of the posts that have used it? You can do this by either navigating to the search bar and typing it in or by clicking your hashtag that’s in your bio. This will take you to a screen displaying both popular and recent posts using your hashtag!
Location Tags
Using a location tag is a method for users to post about the places they visit during their trip and a great way to know for certain that an image was taken at a specific destination. To find a specific location tag, simply navigate to the search bar and start typing in the location. You should see the location pop up in the search results. If you see a location tagged that you want to look at in your feed, you can also click on the tag above the image and it will navigate you to a page displaying both popular and recent posts at that location. Remember, don’t just check city tags, but also local attractions, restaurants, and more!
What to Do When You Find User-Generated Content
Now that you’ve found the perfect image for your feed, it’s time to save the user-generated content to your collection and get approval from the user to actually use the photo in your feed. Follow these steps to make sure that you’re asking for permission in the right way:
- Save the image to your collection so you can easily refer back to it when necessary. See below how to add it to your collection:
2. Like the Image!
3. Comment on the image using verbiage something like this:
“Great photo! With your permission, we’d love to use this in our blog. Let us know if you have any concerns.”
4. Once you receive a response, you can reply and thank them for giving you permission!
Posting the User-Generated Content with Credit
Finally, make sure that when you post the image on your own social feeds, you tag the user in the image, or give them photo credit in the comments. If you’re putting it in your blog, be sure to give them image credit. If you are embedding the photo directly to your website, it’ll automatically give credit where credit is due.
Following this quick approach is an integral step in giving your brand a voice. You also show your visitors appreciation for posting their images of your location. Integrating user-generated content in your blogs and social media feeds will allow future visitors to see others experiencing your destination and can inspire them to do so as well. For more new and exciting ways to use digital marketing to enhance your destination marketing organization, be sure to subscribe to our e-newsletter and follow us across social media at the links below.