Putting a Blog into Facebook, changing the title and descrption

This article is about putting a note about your blog (or any other website) onto Facebook using their share tool, and controlling the heading and text that are shown.

Overview

There are many ways to link a blog and your Facebook account. The simplest options are manual:

If the blog has a Share-this-on-Facebook button or Facebook Like or Send buttons, click this button. If prompted log into Facebook in the window that opens. After that, a post about the blog is automatically made on your status.
(see Putting a Facebook "share this" badge on your blog for more about this.)

If the blog doesn't have these tools, then you need to manually copy the URL from the blog, and paste it into your Facebook wall or status field.

No matter which option you use, Facebook suggests what title, text and picture from the blog shoul be shown in the Facebook entry. They've got better and better at choosing appropriate text and images, but in come cases options suggests are not appropriate.

Fortunately, you can change the suggested title and description..

How to change the title and description that Facebook suggests

1 Click the Share / Like / Send button, or copy the URL for the blog that you want to link to.

2 If prompted, log in to Facebook and / or past the link - otherwise it will come up automatically.

3 Click on the link item (it's in the Attach bar, looks like a drawing-pin)), and when the window opens, paste in the web-address (URL) that you copied in step 1)

4 Click on Attach, and you will see a preview of the default values that Facebook is suggesting, based on what it finds on the blog:

5 If you hover over the title and description part of this preview, you will notice that they are highlighted. This means that you can click on them and edit them.

6 Choose a thumbnail-picture (using the arrow buttons at the bottom left, and edit the title and description by hovering and then clicking on them.

What your friends see

People who see the post on your Facebook feed will not know that you have changed the title and description suggested by Facebook - they simply see the values that you entered.

Putting a Facebook "share this" badge on your blog.

Tools for linking Blogger and the social networking sites

Sharing on Facebook to Page intead of your personal Profile

Automatically sending your posts to Twitter

Pages

Friday, April 9, 2010