When someone posts a link to a web site in Facebook, it populates the link preview box with a photo and some text from the site.
If someone posts a link to my site in Facebook, it is generally just get the site's domain name and one of the images that appears on the site. No text appears.
I would like to be able to control what text and images appear in the link. Is there a specification that they use? Can I provide some metadata so Facebook will display what I want?
Hi,
Here is Facebook's developer page on their share function:
http://wiki.developers.facebook.com/index.php/Facebook_Share/Specifying_Meta_Tags
Basically there are some simple metatags you can use to optimize what appears on FB
<meta name="title" content="title" />
<meta name="description" content="description " />
<link rel="image_src" href="thumbnail_image" / >
AND: The wiki article doesn't mention this, but Facebook CACHES the results of your site for awhile. So, if you're debugging & doing quick iterations, you either need to wait awhile, or rename the page (index2.html, index3.html, etc) until you find something that works.
Be sure to read the wiki article, as it also points out several other pitfalls:
http://wiki.developers.facebook.com/index.php/Facebook_Share/Specifying_Meta_Tags