How To Avoid Facebook & Twitter Share Fail

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By: Drew McManus

In: , Web Tech

Facebook and Twitter are great platforms for generating interest and driving ticket sales but there’s no getting around the fact that you must play by their rules. More often than not, this means jumping through a few hoops to customize or update your share content.

Here Are Two Common Problems

[box]New Content
You publish a new webpage or blog post and when you go to share, Facebook and Twitter seem to be pulling up the wrong image, title, and/or description. Not only does the share probably look bad but worst case scenario is it leaves out some of the most important conversion oriented details. [/box]

[box]Updated Content
You are absolutely, positively, 100 percent certain you updated a featured image or description. You can see the content right there at your website but when you go to share, Facebook and Twitter are still pulling up the old info. [/box]

Facebook Solution

[box]One of the most common reasons you encounter this issue is Facebook has not yet recognized the new or updated content. Even if you can clear your host cache, Facebook simply won’t have it. They scrape your info on their terms. Fortunately, they do provide a tool you can use to instruct Facebook to manually rescrape a page’s content: https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/sharing

FB share debugger

  1. Make sure the “Sharing Debugger” tab selected.
  2. Paste the full URL to the new or updated page.
  3. Select “Debug” button.

From there, the page will reload with the new results.

FB share debugger scrape results

Now, the reality is this is not a perfect tool and if you don’t see the new/edited content, you may need to select the “Scrape Again” button one or more times before the correct content shows up in the results.[/box]

Tip: if you’ve published or updated several pages, use the “Batch Invalidator” tab to process multiple URLs. Be sure to separate each unique URL with a space.

Twitter Solution

[box]Twitter provides a similar, but more straightforward, validation process for verifying how a shared page/post will look as a Twitter card style share: https://cards-dev.twitter.com/validator

Twitter card validator

  1. Paste the full URL to the new or updated page.
  2. Select the “Preview Card” button.

From there, the page will reload with the new results.

Twitter card validator results

[/box]

That’s all there is to it so do yourself a favor and keep both links handy in your bookmarks.

https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/sharing

https://cards-dev.twitter.com/validator

How To Avoid Facebook & Twitter Share Fail

Drew McManus
Author
Drew McManus
In addition to my consulting business, I'm also the Principal of Venture Industries Online but don’t let that title fool you into thinking I'm just a tech geek. I bring 20+ years of global broad-based arts consulting experience to the table to help clients break the cycle of choosing one-size-fits-none solutions and instead, deliver options allowing them to get ahead of the tech curve instead of trying to catch up by going slower. With the vision of legacy support strategy and the delights of creative insights, my mission is to deliver a sophisticated next generation technology designed especially for the field of performing arts. The first step in that journey began in 2010 when The Venture Platform was released, a purpose-designed managed website development solution designed especially for arts organizations and artists. For fun, I write a daily blog about the orchestra business, provide a platform for arts insiders to speak their mind, lead a team of intrepid arts pros to hack the arts, lead an arts business incubator, and love a good coffee drink.
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2 thoughts on “How To Avoid Facebook & Twitter Share Fail”

  1. Thank you for this post! One of my frustrations with Facebook was when I would update an audition page, the first few lines were not updating when added to a post. Thank you for this and your writing in general!

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