Using Open Graph Protocol To Encourage Facebook Likes

The Open Graph protocol (OGP) enables any web page to become a rich object in a social graph. Even more, Facebook recently announced the launch of Open Graph Protocol API.

All website owners should be interested to increase their website visibility in Facebook as it is the largest social media website in the world. OGP meta tag integration to the web pages can encourage/optimize Facebook 'Likes'. Through the meta data applied to web pages,Facebook  users will be able to view the 'likes' in the format described in meta tags (category, type, URL, site name, image, address).

Integrating Open Graph tags on your web page will make your page equivalent to a Facebook page. When a user clicks the 'like' button on the page, a connection is made between your page and the user. Your page will appear in the "Likes and Interests" section of the user's Facebook profile, and you have the ability to publish updates to the user. The data that you provide via the Open Graph Protocol defines how your page will be represented on Facebook. In other words, OGP will help your website gain even more exposure through Social Media!

To get started with this we need the two following things enabled on your web page.

• Facebook 'like' button
  
• OGP Meta tags

Facebook Like Button

If your website has a blog/article section, add the Facebook like button to all the web pages in that section. This will enhance the user interaction and the ability to share with friends.

Open Graph Protocol Meta Tags

These are the Meta tags that are included in one of our article page.

<meta property="og:title" content="This Week In Internet Marketing 2011 02 22" />
<meta property="og:type" content="article" />
<meta property="og:site_name" content="TechWyse Internet Marketing"/>
<meta property="og:url" content="https://www.techwyse.com/blog/internet-marketing/this-week-in-internet-marketing-2011-02-22/" />
<meta property="fb:admins" content="1354053568" />
<meta property="og:image" content="https://www.techwyse.com/images/new-ranking-signals.jpg" />

The above Open Graph protocol Meta Tags defines the following properties: 

og:title - The title of your object as it should appear within the graph, e.g., " This Week In Internet Marketing 2011 02 22".
og:type - The type of your object, e.g., "article". See the complete list of supported types.
og:site_name - The site name as it should appear within the graph, e.g., "TechWyse Internet Marketing"
og:image - An image URL which should represent your object within the graph.
og:url - The URL of your object that will be used as its permanent ID in the graph, e.g., https://www.techwyse.com/blog/internet-marketing/this-week-in-internet-marketing-2011-02-22/

Check here for more properties that can be used to optimize your Facebook 'Likes'. If you are not technical enough to write meta tags, try using the meta tag generator mentioned here in step 2. You can also ensure the meta tags are added correctly on your page with the Facebook URL Linter tool.

If you are using Wordpress and want to enable the OGP and Facebook 'Like' button, here is the plugin.

Hope this helps and if you have any questions feel free to post them here!