Sep
15
How to Use Open Graph Generator for Better Social Media Engagement
Let's talk about one of the most important moments in the life of any piece of online content. What is the single, most important factor that determines whether a person who is scrolling through their social media feed is going to click on the link that you have just shared? Is it the witty and the clever caption that you spent twenty minutes writing? Is it the number of likes that the post has already gotten? No. Most of the time, the decision to click, or not to click, all comes down to the beautiful, the big, and the clickable "card" that automatically appears underneath your post. It is, of course, the link preview.
That link preview is your content's own, personal billboard on the crowded and the noisy highways of Facebook, of LinkedIn, and of Twitter. It is your one, and often your only, chance to be able to grab a busy scroller's attention and to be able to entice them to click.
But here’s the problem. So many of us will just copy and paste a link and we will just cross our fingers and we will hope for the best. We are letting the social media platform itself guess which image and which text it should use to represent our brilliant article. And this is the digital equivalent of letting a complete and a total stranger design the billboard for your brand-new movie. What if you could be the art director? What if you could take complete and total, creative control over every single, tiny element of that important preview the exact image, the perfect headline, and the most compelling description? Well, you can. It is all done with a special, little set of instructions called Open Graph tags, and a simple, online tool can help you to be able to create them, and you don't need to know a single line of code.
Your Content's "Movie Poster": What are Open Graph Tags?
Before we get into the easy "how," let's just pull back the curtain and demystify what these "Open Graph" tags actually are. In the simplest terms, the Open Graph protocol is a set of special, meta tags that you can add to the invisible, <head> section of your website's HTML code. This protocol was originally created by the clever people at Facebook to be able to have more control over how links were displayed, but it has now become the universal and the accepted standard that is used by almost all of the major, social media platforms, including LinkedIn, Twitter, and many others.
The absolute best and the simplest way to think about your Open Graph tags is to imagine that they are the official "movie poster" for your piece of content. Your brilliant, blog post is the movie itself. The Open Graph tags are all of the important and of the creative data that you will provide to be able to create the perfect and the most enticing, movie poster that will then be shown in all of the different, "social media cinemas" around the world. They are a set of simple instructions, a creative brief, that tells the platform exactly how you want your content to be displayed.
The Key Elements of a Click-Worthy Preview
So, what are the actual, key and creative elements that make up this beautiful, digital "movie poster"? It all comes down to a few, core, and very important Open Graph tags.
The first, and the absolute star of the show, is the og:image tag. This is the big, the beautiful, and the eye-catching image that is going to be the thing that stops a person from scrolling. This is, without a single doubt, the single most important and the most impactful, creative element of your entire, link preview.
Next, you have the og:title. This is the movie title itself. It is the big, the bold headline that is going to appear in your preview. It needs to be bold, it needs to be intriguing, and it needs to be concise. It is the thing that has to hook the reader in and to make them want to know more. And then, you have the og:description. This is the short and the persuasive summary that is going to appear right underneath your title. It is the "tagline" for your movie. It is the thing that needs to give the reader a powerful and a compelling reason to be able to "buy a ticket," or in other words, to click on your link.
Why You Can't Afford to Leave This to Chance
So, why is it so incredibly important for you to take control of these tags? Why can't you just let the platforms figure it out for themselves? The reason is that leaving this to chance can have some disastrous consequences for your brand and for your click-through rates.
The biggest and the most common problem is the ugly preview problem. If you do not specifically tell the platform which image you want it to use with the og:image tag, then the platform will just have to try and to guess. And it is often a terrible guesser. It might pull a tiny, a blurry, and a completely irrelevant image from your page, like your company's logo from the footer of your website, or even an ad banner. This looks incredibly unprofessional, and it will absolutely kill your click-through rate.
There is also the uninspired text problem. If you do not set a specific og:description, the platform will usually just grab the first, one or two sentences from your actual article. And these are very rarely the most exciting or the most persuasive parts of your content. And finally, there is the brand inconsistency problem. By taking control of your Open Graph tags, you are ensuring that your brand and that your content are being presented in a consistent and in a professional way, every single time that your content is shared.
The Old Way: Hand-Coding Your "Movie Poster"
For many, many years, the only way to be able to add these important tags to your website was to do it the old-fashioned, the manual, and the highly technical way.
You would have to manually and very carefully open up your page's HTML file. You would then have to find the <head> section of the code. And then, you would have to manually and painstakingly, hand-type each and every one of the different tags, being incredibly careful with the very strict and the very unforgiving, syntax. You would have to type out something like, <meta property="og:title" content="Your Amazing and Wonderful Title" />.
The problem with this method, of course, is that it is very slow, it is very tedious for anyone who is not a professional developer, and it is incredibly and frighteningly easy to make one, single, tiny typo in the code, like accidentally typing property instead of name, or forgetting one of the quotation marks, which would cause the entire thing to completely and totally break.
The Simple, Creative Solution: The Online Open Graph Generator
This pressing need for a fast, for a simple, and for a completely and totally code-free way to be able to design our own, beautiful, social media previews is exactly why every single, smart marketer and every modern blogger now uses an Open Graph Generator.
This type of tool is a wonderful and a creative utility. It is a simple, a beautiful, and a web-based form that does all of that complicated and of that boring, code-writing for you, automatically, in the background. The workflow is an absolute dream. You just go to the tool. You will see a series of simple and of plain-English boxes that are labeled with things like, "Title," "Description," and "Image URL." You just have to fill in these boxes with the exact content that you want to show in your preview. As you are typing, the best of these tools will often show you a live and a visual preview of exactly what your "movie poster" is going to look like. When you are done, the tool will give you the perfectly formatted and the completely error-free code for you to be able to copy and to paste. And the fantastic thing is, with the kind of intuitive and visual tools you can find on toolseel.com, you can feel like a professional, graphic designer, and you can craft the perfect, social share card for your content in just a matter of minutes.
What to Look For in a Great OG Tag Generation Tool
As you begin to explore these wonderfully simple and useful tools, you'll find that the best and most useful ones are designed to be your all-in-one, command center for your social sharing. They are built to give you the information you need, in the clearest and the most actionable way possible. A really top-notch online tool for generating your Open Graph tags should have a few key features. It should include:
- A set of clear, a simple, and an intuitive input fields for all of the most essential and of the most important, Open Graph tags, such as the Title, the Description, the Image, and the URL.
- An instant and a live, and a very helpful, visual preview that will show you exactly how your final, link card is going to look on all of the major and the most important platforms, like Facebook.
- Some very helpful, and some real-time, character counters or some recommendations for the optimal and the most effective length of both your title and of your description.
- The ability for the tool to also be able to generate all of the specific and the required tags that are needed for Twitter Cards, which have a slightly different and a unique format.
- A simple, a convenient, and a one-click "copy code" button that gives you the final and the completely error-free, HTML.
A tool with these features is an invaluable asset for any modern and for any serious content creator.
The Human Art Director: From a Tool to a Strategy
Now for the golden rule, the part of the process that turns a simple tool user into a smart and a strategic marketer. The online generator is the tool, but you are the art director. The tool is the thing that makes the process easy; your job is to be the one who makes the final result effective.
Take a long and a hard look at your og:image. Don't just use the standard, featured image from your blog post. You should be creating a custom and a dedicated, social sharing image for every single piece of your content. A good and a standard size for this is 1200 by 630 pixels. It should have a high-contrast background and it should have some bold and some easy-to-read text that restates your main headline. This is your billboard. Now, look at your og:title. Can you make it a question? Can you create a curiosity gap? Can you make it a little bit more emotional and a little bit less "SEO-focused" than your main page's title? And finally, you should perfect your og:description. This is your one, single chance to be able to speak directly to the social media user. You need to tell them exactly what they are going to get by clicking on your link, and you should use a strong and a clear, call to action. The tool is the thing that creates the code; you are the one who creates the advertisement.
Be the Art Director of Your Social Media Presence
Let’s be honest, your social media link previews are one of the most critical and one of the most important elements of your entire, content distribution strategy. And leaving them to chance is a massive and a completely unnecessary mistake. Open Graph tags are the powerful tool that gives you complete and total control over that crucial, first impression. And a good, online generator is the thing that makes the entire process of creating these important tags simple, fast, and completely accessible to everyone, not just to the coders.
Your valuable and your hard-won content is far too important to be represented by an ugly, a broken, or a boring link preview. It is time for you to become the art director for every single link that you share. By using a simple online tool to generate your Open Graph tags, you can take complete and total, creative control, you can craft a compelling and a highly clickable "movie poster" for all of your content, and you can dramatically improve your social media engagement. Your masterpiece deserves a beautiful frame; go and build one.
