By Tim Brandl
Peer-to-peer fundraising campaigns rely on the ability for fundraisers to share their campaign with friends, family and colleagues and request donations. While e-mail remains the primary means for fundraisers to spread the word about their mission, we’re seeing more and more fundraisers – across age demographics – promoting their campaigns on Facebook.
raisin empowers fundraisers to expand their reach with
easy-to-find social widgets to share their pages and even
Auto-Posts that instantly publish an update with their personal page photo, title and a brief description to Facebook when key fundraising milestones are reached.
Sometimes when these posts are shared Facebook displays the wrong image or title. Not ideal! Facebook posts with relevant images have been shown to
double post engagement (BuzzSumo, 2015), and a wrong image can be especially frustrating after you or a
P2P participant have spent time crafting the
perfect page.
Why does this happen?
The photo, title and description that appear when site visitors Share to Facebook are “scraped” automatically by Facebook based on the meta data it finds on the page. Facebook tends to re-scrape information
every 30 days, so sometimes content changes to may not be reflected for several days and “cached” content appears when the page is shared.
The fix?
Fortunately, Facebook offers a handy tool called
Open Graph Object Debugger. The tool previews how content will preview the page when shared, view exactly what Facebook sees and debug it.
If you’ve found that Facebook is sharing an old photo, simply enter the page URL you’re having issues with and hit the “Fetch new scrape information”. This will force Facebook to re-crawl the page for the page, find new content and share the profile image optimized for Facebook’s sharing best practices. For shared posts, Facebook recommends images that are 1200 pixels by 628 pixels (or anything that's in 1.9:1 ratio).
The end result after you scrape? The perfect share!
Sources:
Pinantoan, A. (2015, May 20). How To Massively Boost Your Blog Traffic With These 5 Awesome Image Stats. Retrieved from http://buzzsumo.com/blog/how-to-massively-boost-your-blog-traffic-with-these-5-awesome-image-stats/