Although Facebook makes it extremely easy to share content with fans and friends, sometimes the quirks of the platform lead to formatting gaffes that keep your posts from looking as polished as you might like. Here are a few suggestions for avoiding some of the most common causes of Facebook Wall post ugliness:
Like and @Mention Other Pages
If you’re going to reference anyone who has a Facebook page in your Wall post, be sure that you Like their pages before you start crafting the post. This allows you to @mention them when you write the link text, which not only makes their name clickable in the published version, it also links your post to their Wall.
Don’t Include the URL In Link Text
If you paste a URL into the Publisher, a link automatically appears below it. But you can achieve the same effect by clicking the “Link” button below the text field and paste the URL into that field. This keeps the URL from appearing in the text above the link, but it still appears in small, light gray text below the headline of the link.
The only exception to this rule is if you want a URL to be embedded in a status update, because your most recent status update lives at the top of your page. In that case, paste the URL into the Publisher text field, but click the X in the upper right corner of the link field that appears when you do so. This removes the link preview but keeps the URL in the status update, and when you publish the status update, the URL remains clickable.
Edit Link Preview Text and Headline
By default, Facebook creates a headline for the link by pulling in the text from the title bar of the article’s window. It also imports the first paragraph of the article as preview text.
However, you’re not stuck with either of them. By clicking on the headline or preview text before publishing the post, you can edit them to your heart’s content: trim down an overly SEO’ed headline, unbury the lede of the article—or, if you’re feeling particularly snarky, completely replace both with text of your own creation.
The character count for a headline is 100 characters; longer headlines will be truncated at the 100-character mark. Preview text can be 255 characters long. If it runs on past that limit, the published link will replace the 255th character with ellipses and cut off the rest. One way to check your character count before publishing the link is to paste the items into a blank document in Word and check the number of character (with spaces) with the Word Count feature.
Select a Thumbnail
As with headlines and preview text, Facebook searches for images on the linked page and allows you to choose one for the preview image of the article. However, not every image on the page will be imported as a potential thumbnail, and if the Facebook platform is experiencing momentary crankiness, you might not be able to import any thumbnails at all. If you don’t see a thumbnail image, delete the post and try again in a few minutes.
For the HTML-inclined, eHow.com has an extremely helpful article on what determines if a thumbnail will be imported and how to code your own site accordingly:
Add a image source meta tag to the head of your document. The tag looks like this: < link rel=”image_src” href=”http://site.com/image.jpg” /> (Remove the space between < and link) Make sure you change the href to where the image is hosted, using the full URL. In order to get Share Preview and other features to read the image correctly, you need to make sure it’s between the head tags in your html. It also helps to have the meta tags “title” and “description”.
Add Your Own Copy
Once you have your link formatted properly, add your own text in the Publisher text field (and don’t forget to @mention). The text can be up to 420 characters long if you’re posting it on your own Wall or 1,000 characters long if you’re posting on someone else’s Wall.
If you are cutting and pasting text from another source, beware of funky line breaks that may sneak in with the metadata. To avoid them, your best bet is to paste the text into a simple text editor like TextEdit and resize the window to see if there are any line breaks. If there are, delete them, and then copy and paste the edited text into the Publisher.
And now, the moment of truth: click Share. If all goes well, you should have a great looking post that contains exactly the information that you want your fans and friends to see. And if something goes wrong, the “Remove” button in the upper right corner is your best friend—click it and start over. Happy posting!
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