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
- Make sure the “Sharing Debugger” tab selected.
- Paste the full URL to the new or updated page.
- Select “Debug” button.
From there, the page will reload with the new 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
- Paste the full URL to the new or updated page.
- Select the “Preview Card” button.
From there, the page will reload with the new results.
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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
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!
You’re very welcome and I’m glad to hear you were able to put the tools to good use so quickly.