Table of Contents
Tellmaps Social Networks
The goal of this spec is to outline how the header of the static server-delivered page should be crafted in order to display per-social network custom format of the included share link snippet.
Prerequisites
Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+
These networks display shared link as a snippet attached to custom share post message (which the user types in when sharing).
In order to deliver a custom snippet for each social network, a different static link has to be provided for each one, as there is no way to make differing headers for all the networks in one HTML page.
Therefore, I strongly suggest to have a GET parameter as follows:
http://tellmaps.com/?subject=WDAIND01&sharing=facebook http://tellmaps.com/?subject=WDAIND01&sharing=linkedin http://tellmaps.com/?subject=WDAIND01&sharing=googleplus
Server-side should then determine which information to send. All information is contained in <html> and <meta> tags.
I don't recommend to share the urls in new URL format. A fallback which the server will process and redirect to new URL format is the most reliable solution, as the new URL format may be google-crawlable, but support in share snippet may vary.
Actually, there is no way to display a snippet for twitter. Therefore, we will leave the “tweet” feature the same as in current tellmaps.
OG tags specification
This OG format is well supported in all three social networks and probably many more. The only exception is missing description in Google+. This is not documented and there is the only information I found in that matter: http://www.seoskeptic.com/google-quietly-removes-descriptions-from-snippets/
First, place this into the <html> tag:
<html lang="en" prefix="og: http://ogp.me/ns#">
Then, according to given social network, provide these META tags:
<meta property="og:title" content="This should display as snippet title"> <!-- can be an item name in tellmaps --> <meta property="og:type" content="website"> <!-- keep always --> <meta property="og:url" content="full-url-to-given-item"> <!-- this can be without the ?sharing GET param, however most social networks use the shared URL, not this one --> <meta property="og:description" content="snippet description, displays under the link and site name"> <!-- google+ ignores any description --> <meta property="og:image" content="full-path-to-image-1"> <!-- one or multiple images --> <meta property="og:image" content="full-path-to-image-2"> <meta property="og:site_name" content="tellmaps.com"> <!-- optional, not found to work well in most networks -->
