© David Coleman | Dreamstime Stock Photos

Like LinkedIn, when you include a URL within a status update on Facebook, there are pre-populated fields that appear below your status update.

So your status update can include the content you write in your update, plus content that is reflective of (and dependent on) the URL you are sharing. Some examples:

Screen shots of some Facebook updates with URLs that show sharing metadata (Taken 25 August 2013)

These URL specific fields are editable and a great additional call to action and can expand and/or support the content visible in your status update.

If it’s important that people do something with your link (e.g. click on it to read more, complete a survey or etc), then you should be thinking about whether the content in those fields will assist in generating your desired outcome and editing it if needed.

The URL specific fields can be populated with an image, a header and a description dependent on:

• how the page the URL is pointing to is constructed, and/or
• whether it includes html metadata that optimises it to faciliate sharing on platforms like LinkedIn and Facebook (social metadata)

Facebook supports open graph tags, so if the social metadata has been set for page being shared, then when we share on Facebook https://developers.facebook.com/docs/opengraph/howtos/maximizing-distribution-media-content/there will be accompanying information.

Like LinkedIn, it is possible to edit the information accompanying the URL although the functionality does vary.

You can:

• Edit the title accompanying the link
• Edit the description accompanying the link
• Select from images(s) recognised in the metadata (or choose not to show a thumbnail)
• Upload a different image to accompany the link (if posting on a Facebook page that you are an admin for)

Again, like LinkedIn, while we know the character limit of Facebook status updates, it’s harder to find the limit for the URL specific fields.

I plugged in some Lipsum to see how many characters the title and description fields within the Facebook URL specific sharing fields allow…and how much they truncate. The results were different from LinkedIn (to be expected, different platforms = different ways of displaying/working with information).

Firstly, I had a look at what would display if I posted a link to a post on my blog on a Facebook page as is:

Sharing a post from a wordpress blog as is (Taken 24 August 2013)

I don’t have any social optimisation plugs in or SEO plug ins on my blog, it is pretty much whatever at the mercy of elements in the theme I have chosen and WordPress itself.

It is not as neat or as nice if I just share the front page of my blog:

Sharing the front page of the blog (Taken 25 August 2013)

While I do have several images to choose from when I share the site (as there are several on the front page of my site), the text is actually the first piece of text displaying on the front page: it relates to a specific post.

This is an argument for editing the social sharing data and uploading a photo as the content crawled by Facebook to populate these fields is not always exactly reflective of why you are sharing the link (e.g. the selection of images crawled by Facebook are all feature images for posts, not anything relevant to the overall site).

Of course, you wouldn’t normally share a link to the front page of a site: usually there is a reason why you are telling people something (there is a desired outcome you want to see), so you wouldn’t normally be sharing a general link, rather you’d share a link to the exact place where they can complete that desired outcome (e.g . read an article, complete a survey, see your portfolio of work).

Playing with the social sharing limits

I then started playing with the limits for the title and description fields in the social sharing data.

On Facebook, it works very differently to LinkedIn: while there is a limit to how many characters can go in the title field, how much text is displayed in the description field can depend on how long your title field is. What this means for you, is that if you are planning to share something on each of these platforms where you know you will need to customise the social sharing fields, you should take slightly different approaches.

The examples below should help to explain:

Title field

Playing with the title field limits (Taken 25 August 2013)

The title field truncates at 100 characters.

In the screen shot above I have highlighted the example post but you should be able to see a couple of other posts around it – notice how the length of the title is determining how much of the description is displaying?

If I deleted the title completely, Facebook display a generic title (the URL for the domain I am sending you to). In this example, this is a link to a specific post:

Deleting the title data to see what happens when posted (Taken 25 August 2013)

So: even if I delete all the information in the title field, Facebook will populate it with something. The domain of the overall site, in this case.

Description field

The length of the description field is very dependent on the length of your title field.

It appears that the display of social sharing data depends on the line count used in the title field.

Long title, very short description:

Title field at max limits, description field = one line (Taken 25 August 2013)

Short title, very long description:

One line title, 4 line description (Taken 24 August 2013)

Conclusions

While the title field has a character limit (100 chars), the display of the title and description fields on Facebook is driven by the line count in each field…with content in the title field taking precedence.

There are 5 lines to play with – the title will always be a minimum of one (1) line and the description field will also always be a minimum of one (1) line.

The basic format looks a little like this:

[Title field: editable]
[domain of site, e.g. ellipticalpointofview.com: not editable]

[Description field: editable]

So if the title is 2 lines, the description field will display 3 lines; if the title is 1 line, the description will be 4 lines and so on. If the title field is deleted, the domain of the site will also be displayed in the Title field (so there will always be one title line).