You don’t necessarily have to be on Facebook to take advantage of the widely popular social networking site. But you should make sure your website is Facebook friendly.
Facebook has a feature where users can share links and post content into their stream of updates. That shared content will then be seen by their friends and fans. Users can post links directly in Facebook or you can add ‘Share on Facebook’ icons to your site. The application works by visiting the site you’re linking to and grabbing a preview of relevant information, including the title, description and any images embedded into the page.
But sometimes the information shared isn’t always helpful. You can change that by checking out what information Facebook grabs. You can make sure your site has a useful meta description in the header (which is also good practice for search engine optimization). If you have a blog you might consider putting an excerpt of the blog entry in the description. That way the excerpt will show up when someone shares the link on Facebook, as opposed to the general description of your blog. More specific details will be more likely to hook people.
Facebook’s share feature will also grab an image from the shared link and give the user an option of picking the thumbnail that fits best. You can override this by pointing to a specific image. This might be helpful if your logo isn’t an isolated file on your site—you can point to the perfect image. This is also incentive to include relevant images with your blog entries and make sure when people share the links they’re sharing relevant and helpful information.
Visit Facebook and try sharing a few links from your site. Check them out and see how the title, description and thumbnail images come up. If they’re not as good as they could be, considering changing them. After all, there are more than 300 million users on Facebook.
