Facebook Marketing Success: Optimizing WordPress for the Open Graph
If you are a business owner who is serious about using Facebook to target potential customers then the Open Graph Protocol plugin for your wordpress blog or website is a must have.
First, a brief summary on Facebook's Open Graph Protocol.
According to Facebook, the Open Graph Protocol:
“enables you to integrate your Web pages into the Social Graph. It is currently designed for Web pages representing profiles of real-world things — things like movies, sports teams, celebrities, and restaurants. Including Open Graph tags on your Web page, makes your page equivalent to a Facebook Page”.
The Open Graph Protocol is important for a number of reasons:
- Your website pages or blog posts can then show up in Facebook searches.
- You can automatically push any updates to your page directly to the Facebook user.
- You can target your advertising to people that “like” your content.
Open Graph Protocol Properties
Four required properties are defined by the Open Graph Protocol and I will use a blog post about a Gator football game as an example:
og:title - The title of your object as it should appear within the graph, e.g., "Florida Gators vs. Georgia Bulldogs".
og:type - The type of your object, "sports_Gators". This format is preset by Facebook, you can see their complete list of open graph type formats here
og:image - on Facebook, images are important. Include the URL for an image that will represent your content within the graph. The image must be at least 50px by 50px and have a maximum aspect ratio of 3:1. Stick to PNG, JPEG and GIF formats. You may include multiple og:image tags to associate multiple images with your page.
og:url - The canonical URL of your post or page that will be used - this is the permanent link that Facebook will use to represent it.
These additional properties are useful as well:
og:video - Facebook supports embedding video in SWF format and you can include yours by using the og:video tag along with the URL for the video e.g., “
Now that we have a solid understanding of what the Open Graph Protocol is, lets talk about how to easily incorporate this information into your wordpress website. A new plugin, entitled , is available in the Word Press plugin directory. Once you install it, it will show up in the “settings” section of your navigation.
This plugin does two things: the first you will notice right away - it adds the “like” button to your wordpress site. Behind the scenes it adds the “og:” metadata to any post or page of your site so that if someone “likes” your post that data is transferred to Facebook along with the summary information that’s posted on Facebook to represent “likes”.
Now I have to warn you: Facebook does require you to jump through a few hoops in order to get the Open Graph plugin for Wordpress to activate properly. WP-OGP will ask you for two required pieces of information:
Facebook User ID
Facebook Platform application ID
Don’t let these requirements intimidate you...both are easy to acquire and the processes are documented.
name your application whatever you wish, and push on past the captcha spam filter. On the next page, you will see a few fields with questions about your app and notice that NONE are required. You might want to fill in the description field just for your own information. Hit “save changes” at the bottom of the form and your new application ID will be presented to you.
Take both the application ID and your Facebook User ID and drop them into the WP-OGP plugin and you are done!