When you have a page or a news article that you'd like to share on social media, the metadata is what puts in all the information for you automatically. To demonstrate the kind of help this offers, let's have a look at an example of a news article that was shared on Facebook.



You'll see that there are four elements to this post on Facebook.

- The image, which is decided by the tag "og:image"
- The title, which is decided by the tag "og:title"
- The description, which is decided by the tag "og:description"
- The URL, or the page that you go to when you click the link. It is decided by the tag "og:url".

Now, you don't need to worry about these tags themselves - they are filled out automatically according to the information that you put in. If there is no information then it will default select other options. So if your post isn't quite looking as you intended, then there is a chance you have filled out the wrong option. To find the right option, just read on.

To ensure that the page/article you post to social media has the right information that you want, make sure that these following fields/sections are properly filled in:

News Articles

1) The image will be chosen under the "Object Image" tab of the News Item object.
2) The title will be the first field "Title" under the "Article" tab.
3) The description will take the contents of the Article field under the "Article" tab.
4) The URL will be chosen under the "URL's" tab of the News Item object.

Web Pages

For sharing a webpage on social media, there are slight changes to the metadata that is put on the shared post. Look out for the following on your Web Page object:

1) The image will be chosen under the "Object Image" tab of the Web Page object, just like the News Item object.
2) The title is located under the "Details" tab on Web Page objects, and is simply chosen by the Name of the object.
3) The description will take the contents of the Meta Description field under the "Page Details" tab.
4) The URL will be chosen under the "URL's" tab of the Web Page object.
5) The keywords are words for the page to appear on search engines. They are not included in the posts you share to social media, but are still important.

You will notice that in the example post, the image looks slightly unrelated or not an ideal choice of image. This is because on that specific example, there was no selected image, so the metadata selected a default image using the first image found on the webpage. This principle holds true for the other three options of title, description and URL, but in different ways:

• The title is always the name of the object, including if it is blank.
• The description, if there is none, will take the first section of text it finds on the page.
• The URL, if there is none, will take the main URL of your website and then the ID of the article/page. For example, abc.co.uk/12345, where abc.co.uk is your site, and 12345 is the ID of the article/page.