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Nowadays consumers have become a business’s most prized stakeholders. Content consumption is stronger than ever and social media users are somewhat content curators if not creators of their own. This means that there is no room on the web or on social platforms for content that is not optimized to its fullest potential. Paid advertising on Facebook is now a given, so the best way to maximize your spending is to give users an incentive to share your content. One way to do this is with Open Graph.
What Is Open Graph?
Open Graph is a technology that allows you to personalize your rich graph objects so your content is fully optimized for social, and it gets categorized more accurately, allowing users to like contextually relevant objects which are associated to particular actions, which are identified through metadata. It pretty follows the concept of User >> Action >> Object. So if you’re on a brand page, you can like an author or if you’ve just listened to a piece of music, you can like a singer.
Open Graph makes content not only contextually relevant, but content is seamless and more visually appealing for users, which incentivizes interaction. This creates topical, relevant sharing which is no longer limited to one-dimensional “likes” but can also be “I read & like this author’s work (object)” or “I listened to this song & like this singer”.
It’s been around a while, since 2010 and the concept is pretty familiar to marketers and content teams. This new programming technology integrates your website and Facebook or Twitter on a metadata level, giving publishers more control over their content.
You’re most likely using structured markup to create snippets for your website, and the impact of rich snippets on your click-through rate can be significant.
Open Graph gives publishers access to structured markups in order to fully personalize the user experience and gain valuable data, useful for analysis.
Open Graph Basics
The various sections you’ll want to optimize are the basics: URL, title, description, site_name, image and app_id. These will make the difference between a good social posting and a great social posting. Needless to say, competition for social engagement with your brand is high considering there are currently over 16 million business pages on Facebook to date. If your content contains video or audio, you’ll want to personalize your markups to identify these content types which are common media types on Facebook.
Keep in mind that if you don’t customize your data, Facebook and other social sites will simply use scraped default data – you don’t need to be a content marketing guru to know that simply won’t do if you’re trying to increase your click-through rate.
Open Graph Data Best Practices
Your URL with Open Graph is canonical, which means you’re sure to find much more traffic to your desktop website. This is key when trying to understand how to measure traffic from social. Your title shouldn’t exceed 80 characters and is often noted as one of the major factors in CTR so choose wisely. The description should not exceed 300 characters, which is a huge plus considering scraped descriptions are often cut off randomly. The image on your social post seems to be one of the most talked about, and most promising pieces of data with CTR potential worth exploring. A random scraped advertisement is definitely not the way you want to spend your money on paid advertising.
Another important metadata markup to make is the content type. Facebook automatically labels the content type as a “website”. Though most of the time this is true, that may not always be the case. If your product is your website, great but if your product is something else like a persona, book, food, or a movie then you’re going to want to update your type so that your content is categorized correctly in their interest section for Facebook users.
Get Started With Open Graph
Paid media on Facebook is the norm and is needed for businesses to survive the competition and reach a small fraction of the nearly 1 billion current Facebook users. But the next step in Facebook marketing is focusing more and more on C2C “advertising” so the concept of sharing will need to be defined even further – what are you sharing exactly, to whom, and why? Open Graph begins to tackle this very concept.