What Are Social Meta Tags? How to Control How Your Content Looks in Social Media Shares

Have you ever pasted a link into Facebook or Twitter to find that the associated image has nothing to do with the content of that page, or that the post description reads like an SEO Mad Lib?

You think twice about sharing it, don’t you?

There’s a way for marketers to control the way their cork bicycle zone content displays as it shows up on social networks including Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. You control the social media content your page generates through social meta tags.

For instance, if someone copies a link to the index page of the Tim Ferriss blog in their Facebook status update:

tim ferriss blog header

The index page of the blog of Tim Ferriss, podcast host and author of “The 4-Hour Workweek”: http://tim.blog/

It looks like this:

example of poor Open Graph markup is pasted into a Facebook status update, the results is a lack-luster piece of content.

What you see here has room for improvement. You want to compel a viewer to click, right? The problem here is that the image, headline and description haven’t been crafted to get a click. People probably ignore or trash this post instead of sharing it.