Great presentation is half the marketing.
Whether it is presenting a dish of delicious pasta or presenting your pitch to the investors, the fact remains the same. If you are able to present it in a great and convincing manner, half the battle is won. Most probably this is because we actually go by our intuition and first impression. A badly presented and garnished dish will put off your customers even it tastes good. Same for pitching or selling your products to customers.
While we take care of presenting our pitch, products, ads, and websites in the best manner possible, one thing of often missed out on.
While working for various clients on their websites we found that although the sites look great and are fast and intuitive, the way they are displayed when shared on social media — is a notch-less than perfect.
In most cases, it seems that the web-designing did not optimize the sites specifically for social media.
Why is optimizing for social media sharing so important?
Today everything is social. Whatever you do gets shared on social media — be it Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter, LinkedIn, Quora — you name it. For most of the platforms, the user is scroll-happy. Most of the users will just scroll down and scan the images and like them — particularly for no apparent reason. As a business, you just have that fraction of ‘scan-time’ to woo the viewer and convert them to customers/clients. So what image, text, heading, and size gets shared on social media is super important.
Visualize this. Suppose you are dealing with water purifiers and have posted an article about how you are following vivid protocols while installing purification systems. Great post.
However, when the post is shared on social media — say Facebook, the image it picks up from your site is a person wearing PPE and a mask. Also, the heading gets snipped off. A casual scroller will presume the post to be related to some covid medicine or health service and won’t click on it.
Now if you optimize the post and ask Facebook to show an image that shows a man wearing PPE installing a water purifier and with the heading ‘we follow COVID protocols while installing water purifier’. Chances are a casual surfer will notice it and relate it to water purifiers.
So, it is absolutely important to use the social real-estate of 1200px x 160px optimally.
How to check and debug how the link will look on social media
Almost all social media platforms have their own debugger/checker to give you an idea of how your link will look on their platform. Also, they have pointers as to what is wrong and what can be improved.
Here is a list of the social platform debuggers
https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/
You might have to re-scrap if you have recently made any changes.
https://cards-dev.twitter.com/validator
https://developers.pinterest.com/tools/url-debugger/
https://search.google.com/test/rich-results
https://www.linkedin.com/post-inspector/
All in one — iframely
How does it work? How to specify what image or text is shared?
Usually, every webpage has some metadata from which the social platforms take the data to be shared. In case the metadata is absent, it takes a guess from the actual text and images of the page. Usually, in such cases, it will pick the post title and a snippet of the text. For the image — it will pull the first image of the page or the featured image it is there. Else it can go for any image present on the page including the logo.
For some page builders like Elementor etc, it becomes more tricky at times.
So if you want the social platforms to show something specific in terms of image, title, and snippet, you can specify ghost via metatags. You can also specify different data for different platforms. For example different image dimensions for Facebook and different for Twitter.
How to implement
Theoretically, implementation is very simple. You just have to add a few metatags in your page Html head section.
However, doing this for every post is a pain. So there are few functionalities in almost all CMS. Since most people use WordPress, we will discuss specifically WordPress.
There are various SEO plugins that do the job very well. If I was to pinpoint one plugin — it has to be the Yoast SEO plugin. It’s easy to use — just set it up and you will have an additional field in every post and page whey you can specify the images and text for Facebook and Twitter.
Also if you are using Elementor, Yoast easily integrates with Elementor.
Other than Yoast you can also use any plugin to add meta tags for every post and page.
For specifying images, setting up a featured image is also a good idea. However, if you want to show an image that does not show up on your post — the Yoast SEO plugin is the best bet.
Hope that was helpful.
We at #fishyHUE are into graphic designing and website designing. If you are looking forward to designing or website designing service or just want to discuss something — you are welcome.
