Wednesday, January 25, 2012

Debug Your Links for Facebook

Are you trying to link to a webpage on Facebook, but your links aren't pulling the correct title, photo thumbnail or description, or any at all? The friendly folks at developers.facebook.com have a solution for you - Facebook Debugger: https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug

Although the terse description tells you to "Enter a URL to see some helpful feedback about your page markup," the tool actually pulls the info for you as well as debugging the link to pull the correct title, image and description when you put the link in a Facebook post or comment. This will also repair the links when they're posted in scheduling services like Hootsuite.

I discovered this handy tool when Facebook kept pulling old titles and descriptions for one of my clients' websites. I was pulling my hair out trying to update the links - working with the web guys to update the page's back end, checking and re-checking it, but to no avail. Facebook and Hootsuite both kept pulling the old cached version. Thanks to the Debugger, the pages are all updated and I still have all of my hair.

If you have any questions on debugging links for Facebook, or any social media management questions at all, I'd love to hear from you in the comments or via email.

Happy posting!

2 comments:

  1. I'm having a problem with posting links on my iPhone Facebook app. It posts the URL but nothing else (i.e no description and no thumbnail). I don't know anyone else with this problem. I have tried to use the debugger and copied the link from there. managed to get a thumbnail up but then I had the massive developers.Facebook etc url above it. Am I missing something??

    Is it a problem with my app? How should I ACTUALLY be using the debugger? My understanding was that I would put the link in and it would return a 'debugged' address for me to then post in Facebook. This has been annoying the hell out of me for a long time so if you could help that would be great!

    By the way it is EVERY link I try and share or post

    ReplyDelete
  2. You just saved my hair. Thanks.

    ReplyDelete