If you’re using WordPress, several plugins make it possible to implement social meta tags without ever having to write a single line of code.
Some options include:
WPSSO for social markup across the major social sites
JM Twitter Cards for the full range of Twitter Card types
WordPress SEO by Yoast for Facebook Open Graph tags and Twitter Cards
WordPress plugins for social meta tags are a quick cork bicycle zone and easy way to associate custom headlines, descriptions and images with your WordPress posts and web pages on a page-by-page basis.
Yoast SEO WordPress plugin UI
Facebook Open Graph data input fields in the Yoast SEO WordPress plugin. If you were to click on the Twitter bird tab, you would see the same fields for customizing Twitter Card markup.
If you’re using different software to operate your site, the social markup for Facebook Open Graph, Twitter Cards and the other major social networks is below.
Open Graph Tags
The Open Graph protocol is Facebook’s standard for implementing social meta tags. It has also become recognized by all the major social platforms, including LinkedIn and Twitter. This means that Twitter, LinkedIn and other networks often pull the headline, description and image indicated in the Open Graph tags.
Facebook displays 300 characters at most
og:image URL of unique image, recommended dimensions 1200×630 pixels
og:type article (otherwise defaults to “website”)
In order to have the Facebook shares that come from your webpages formatted with a headline (title), description and image of your choosing, like this:
example of good open graph social media content
To make sure your Open Graph tags have been properly configured, use Facebook’s Sharing Debugger to view an error report and see a preview of how a shared URL will appear when posted to Facebook.
Pro tip: If you update a page’s OG tags, use the Sharing Debugger to force Facebook to do a fresh scrape of the URL, which will cause Facebook to pull the new social meta tag data. Otherwise, it might pull from cache instead of showing your updated content.