Optimizing Social Link Snippets for Facebook, Twitter & Google+

So, you’ve put time and effort into publishing quality content across your social media profiles, or maybe you just published the content to your site and want users to share it. Either way, Facebook, Google+ and Twitter can help make your content more shareable with rich snippets of content that can be shared across platforms. These snippets are platform-specific and include detailed information about the content being shared, displayed in a user-friendly way.

For purposes of this blog post, we are going to focus strictly on sharing links to content on your site. However, Facebook, Twitter and Google+ all offer similar types of snippets for additional content or media such as images or videos.

Facebook Best Practices

Facebook designs a social snippet for a link that includes 4 pieces:

·         Link image

·         Link title

·         Link domain

·         Link description

The link snippet is in addition to your profile image thumbnail, your page title, and any content you wish to publish in addition to the link. When sharing a link, your post content can include an introduction to the content or commentary about that content.

Facebook determines what information to pull by looking for schema built into the code of the page being linked to. Facebook uses Open Graph Schema to allow content creators to inform the content pulled to populate these snippets.

Ideally, there are 5 Open Graph tags for pages shared as links:

·         “og:title” will be the title that Facebook populates in the snippet, which doubles as anchor text for the URL that is being shared.

·         “og:type” will be “website” for content shared as a link.

·         “og:image” lets you specify the URL of the image you wish Facebook to use in the link’s rich snippet. Facebook recommends a “thumbnail size” image of at least 120×90 pixels. If an image is too large, Facebook will shrink it to fit.

·         “og:description” will be the description that will be displayed in the snippet.

·         “og:url” is the canonical URL for the content being shared.

It is important to keep in mind that Facebook does not have hard character limits for titles and descriptions. However, the snippet will include a hard limit of 5 lines of text including the link title, the link domain, and the link description. As the domain almost always takes only one line, in addition to the example above, you can choose to have Facebook display 1 line of title, 1 line of domain, and 3 lines of description (which will buy you about 150 characters of description), or 3 lines of title, 1 line of domain, and 1 line of description (where Facebook will limit your title to 100 characters). You control the title and description ratio by the number of characters used in the Open Graph title tag. The shorter the title, the more room for a description.

Facebook Alternatives

What happens if you don’t implement Open Graph Schema? Facebook will search your metadata and try to put together it’s best guess of what should be there, which may not match what you think should appear in your snippet. Facebook will choose an image for you, which may be an image you don’t want to be associated with your content.

Twitter Best Practices

Twitter has recently released rich snippets called “Twitter cards”. Twitter’s “summary card” is the rich snippet generated for links shared on the platform. While cards are still being rolled out, Twitter is currently asking content creators to apply for the program after implementing the schema. Whether or not you apply now, we still recommend getting in the habit of using this schema, as cards will continue to roll out in the near future. 

Cards can be accessed by a link generated at the bottom of a Tweet:

 

Twitter’s summary card includes 3 pieces:

·         Link image

·         Link title

·         Link description

A summary card also includes information that is not link-specific including your profile image thumbnail, your Twitter name and handle, and any content you wish to publish in addition to the link. It also displays dynamic Tweet information below the link content including your Twitter name, your Twitter handle, number of retweets, number of favorites, and thumbnails for users who have retweeted or favorited the Tweet.

Twitter pulls this information from the page using a similar schema markup we’re calling Twitter Schema. Ideally, there are 5 Twitter Schema tags for Twitter to pull information for the summary card:

·         “twitter:card” tells Twitter what type of card to generate, in this case “summary”. It will default to summary if not included in the metadata.

·         “twitter:url” is the canonical URL for the content being shared.

·         “twitter:title” is the title of your content as it should appear on the card, which doubles as anchor text for the URL being shared. Twitter will only display the first 70 characters.

·         “twitter:description” is the description of the content, with a maximum of 200 characters.

·         “twitter:image” lets you specify the URL of the image you wish Twitter to use in the card. Twitter recommends an image greater than 60×60 and smaller than 120×120 pixels. If it is greater than 120×120, it will be shrunk to fit, if it is smaller than 60×60, it will not be shown.

Twitter Alternatives

What happens if you don’t implement Twitter Schema? If Twitter wants to create a card with your content and it does not find Twitter Schema, it will fall back on Open Graph Schema. It is important to keep in mind that Twitter and Facebook support different size images and different character limits for title and description.

Google+ Best Practices

Google+ designs a social snippet for a link that includes 3 pieces:

·         Link image

·         Link title

·         Link description

The link snippet is in addition to your profile image thumbnail, your profile title, and any content you wish to publish in addition to the link. Again, the post content is a great place for a summary of the content.

Google+ finds this information in schema tags, just like Facebook and Twitter, but Google+ relies on markup from Schema.org. Google+ will use the name, image, and description properties of any Schema.org type. Just make sure that you have tags that are optimized for Google+.

A Google+ link snippet will display a title of about 140 characters, and it appears that there is no character limit for link description. However, we recommend keeping it around 185 characters to ensure the information is user friendly. Images used in Google+ snippets should be 150×150 pixels.

Google Alternatives

If Google+ does not find markup from Schema.org, it will pull data from Open Graph tags you may have set up for Facebook. Again, keep in mind that Google+ allows for a longer title, longer description, and recommends a larger image. If your image is optimized for Facebook or Twitter, it may not be displayed correctly or at all on Google+.

News agencies such as ABC News or the Weather Channel offer examples of how utilizing schema for social can pay off not just on social platforms, but also offering images and text for Google’s SERP when users search for current events.

We recommend implementing all three types of schema (Open Graph, Twitter, and Schema.org) to ensure that you are taking advantage of the different opportunities across social platforms and to ensure that your snippets show the way you want them to across social platforms. It may be easier to rely on Open Graph for all three platforms, but just be sure you understand how each platform will use those tags individually to ensure that your content is being represented the way it should be.

10 Reasons Your Blog Could Be Bleeding Readers

Is Your Blog Bleeding Readers?

If you run a blog, then you probably struggle with the age-old issue of bleeding readers. It’s tough to keep folks coming back for more! But there are things you can do to make sure that your readers stay tuned to your blog.

At the end of the day, your blog should be about producing quality content that is relevant to your readers. If you’re giving them what they want, they’ll come back. But sometimes other elements of your blog can be causing frustration as well.

10 Reasons Your Blog Could Be Bleeding Readers

If your content is strong and you are still losing readers, you may want to analyze some of the following aspects of your blog site.

Awkward Layout

Your blog is your virtual home. So, like you would with your real home, make sure that it is warm and presentable for visitors. In other words, your layout should be both aesthetically pleasing and organized. If it looks as though you threw your blog layout together within two minutes (as in, it looks sloppy and haphazard), then your followers won’t want to look at it long.

Do you have too many ads? Are there too many things going on? Is it difficult to find your navigation menus? Consider simplifying your layout so readers focus on the content.

Overkill

While it is important to remain consistent with your blogging, avoid posting more than 5 or 6 times a week. No more than one post on a day, either. Posting more than this can make your followers feel as though you’re blasting them with too much content. Of course, this is very dependent upon the type of blog you’re running. News blogs, of course, will far surpass these limitations. The point here is to remember that too much content can be frustrating. If readers are following your blog and getting updates, you may be flat out annoying them with too many.

Unreadable

Choose fonts that are clear. Don’t make your readers work too hard to read what you’ve written. Additionally, don’t put your font in a color that is difficult to see. Legibility is a key factor in a pleasant reading experience.

Consider balancing white space as well. If your paragraphs are too long, you can cause readers to lose interest. This goes for content that is too wide as well. Therefore, balance your white space (the blank space in between text and graphics) by creating more readable width.

Offensive

If your posts are, on average, overly slanderous and offensive, then you will more than likely see a higher rate of no-returns. It is okay to be opinionated, but there is a way to word your opinions in a respectful manner.

We all like a strong voice that makes us think, smile, laugh, or generally incites an emotional response. But too much negativity just frustrates. So if you have a strong voice and find yourself losing readership, consider toning it down a bit.

Ignorance is Not Bliss

If you are an opinionated writer, make sure you know what you’re writing about. As a silly example, imagine you are ultra-anti-Twilight series. You write all kinds of posts bashing on various aspects of the movies and books. However, if you have not read the books or seen the movies, then you are an uninformed reader and will be viewed as such. While others may agree with your general view, your lack of expertise will eventually result in lost readers.

Length

Keep a balance in the length of your blogs. If they are all over 1,000 words, then you have a problem. You will overwhelm your followers. Occasional long blogs are okay, but make sure to separate them into paragraphs.

Various studies show various results. But generally speaking, posts over 1,000 words will take too long for readers to get through. Look at your metrics and see if you can find a trend in longer vs. shorter posts and adjust accordingly.

No images

People want to read blogs for entertainment, so entertain them. It is not necessary to post an image on every post, but an occasional shot of your post’s subject is appropriate and will add interest to your post. Images also help with search engine optimization, especially if you title your images with the main keyword of your article title.

Grammarly Misuse

See what I did there? Raise your hand if you cringed a little bit. So will your readers. If you are a person who struggles with grammar and spelling, then write your blog drafts in Microsoft Word or other word processing systems that will check grammar and spelling for you. Sites with poor writing and grammar are likely to be unfollowed.

Too touchy feely

We do not need to hear the nitty-gritty details of your life. A blog is not your diary, and it should not be treated as such. Of course, there are exceptions, but balance personal drama with valuable content. A good story requires some personal backstory so we can all relate to it. But keep the personal stuff focused on the point you’re trying to drive home.

Unemotional

Yes, this feels antithetical to the previous reason, but it is not. There should be a balance between personalizing your posts and gushing your deep, dark secrets. If readers wanted to read straight-up dry information, they would read the newspaper. So don’t write like a robot; give your blog a flavor of your personality and life.

Eliminate these 10 frustrations and your quality content will have even more power to keep readers coming back to your blog.

Beating Google Adwords

Customers for Life, Set for Life

A lifetime customer value is absolutely critical to your success online.

Here’s a straight fact. A study conducted by Bain & Company last year showed that repeat e-commerce buyers spend more money, refer more customers, and buy a broader range of products than one and done shoppers. Other studies have shown figures as high as 34% for average repeat shoppers buying similar products.

That means once you get them in by fulfilling the want that wasn’t previously available in that market you can start offering your competitor’s products. Your customers are practically guaranteed to buy something again as long as it’s similar and in the same kind of industry to what they’ve bought already.

You’ve built credibility and rapport. They believe in you. They’ve given you their credit card number.. Hopefully you’ve done your job and they’ve had a good experience with you. You haven’t ripped them off. You haven’t lied to them or failed to deliver on a promise.

You took care of them. You gave them good customer service. You gave them great value for the dollars they invested in you. Are they going to buy from you again? Absolutely! They qualified themselves to do business with you. It’s easy to sell them again. It shows you the power of backend marketing.

When you treat every prospect visiting your webpage as a potential lifetime customer, you don’t care what they’re buying from you today. You should even be willing to lose a little money on your first sale, because it’s all about the backend. You make all the money on the repeat sale, and it costs nothing to mail to them for the rest of their lives. So if you even lose money on the front end, you’re going to make that money back by selling them again and again and again.

Don’t worry about the $20 you’re making today. Think about that customer that may be worth $2,000 over the next two years to you.

Now think about the ways you can more easily develop multiple streams of income from the internet. You find niche; passionate small markets that only take a few weeks to monopolize, and you build a website and a business that has small profits, but combined with others equal large profits.

The process moves faster because you can test your efforts quicker and easier. You know exactly if things are going to be successful even before you launch them because you can test smaller segments in 24 hours. You send emails to 1,000 people, and you know exactly how much money it’s going to make you based on that response. If it responds well, you send the email to the whole list. That’s a launch.

Before, you used to advertise in a magazine and to get results back in 30, 60 days minimum! Now, you can get results in 24 hours.

There’s no magic wand here. There’s no genius to it. This is easy, no brainer type of stuff. It’s so easy you can walk away after you’ve set things up and earn an incredible month’s income very, very quickly.

The internet’s open 24 hours a day, seven days a week. You know this already — are you taking full advantage of it?

The Quadrilateral Features of Earning Better Income Through Online Money-Making

Today there are some thousands of online money making sites today. The world is today at such a juncture where online businesses are gaining returns hitherto never experienced. However, all of the sites available are not exactly what they promise to be. They would try and tempt you to avail their services, but a blindfold step towards them might just prove to be catastrophic for them.

It might just seem that it is kind of a confusing statement. But, that is exactly a conclusion drawn after practical experience. Many programs named, MaxPro & Infinite Income, Carbon Copy, Abunza, Gifting Programs, Reverse Funnel, Big Ticket etc. are some of the most unyielding ones. They are pathetically disheartening incidences.

But there has to be way to avoid all these fluffy and void promises and deal with some useful programs. This is why after a lot of market research it has been found out that, there are four specific features unique of the online money making market, that is essential in any of systems. Only these features can help customers derive the desired results.

The Four Golden Features

To ensure recurrent growth and high profits, these four factors are indispensible. The person who deals with a money-making program that possesses the qualities doesn’t need to have much of computer knowledge or expertise. He will be able to enjoy growth as a natural effect. These features work in a kind of a joint process. They complement each other and together pave the way for a profitable business. Basically if you end up dealing with such a company will be able to gain at least 10000 dollars within two days.

It is high time that you start enjoying a salary that you deserve. Now let us get introduced to the four Golden features that we have been discussing all along. These features are actually in a question form, the answers to which will be the most beneficial.

1.      Is the job being able to earn you enough money which will enable you to pay your bills off and yet leave with some amount to save?

2.      Are you being able to meet up to the regular expenses? Whatever you are required to buy for yourself and your family should be covered within your expenditures without any problem.

3.      How much extra is the new job going to offer you? However, the answer is quite obvious any online money-making system will pay you much higher than your current job.

4.      To what extent will this job be helpful in offering you the kind of salary and the consequent lifestyle you have been waiting for all these days?

If you can have the answers to these questions, you will have a clear picture of what kind of money-making program you are dealing with. If your analysis meets your needs, there will be no doubt that you can have a guaranteed boost in your income.

The iPhone 5 Scores Well, With a Quibble

     

If you were taking a college course called iPhone 101, your professor might identify three factors that have made Apple’s Smartphone a mega-success.

First, design. A single company, known for its obsession over details, produces both the hardware and the software. The result is a single, coherently designed whole.

Second, superior components. As the world’s largest tech company, Apple can call the shots with its part suppliers. It can often incorporate new technologies — scratch-resistant Gorilla glass, say, or the super sharp Retina screen — before its rivals can.

Third, compatibility. The iPhone’s ubiquity has led to a universe of accessories that fit it. Walk into a hotel room, and there’s probably an iPhone connector built into the alarm clock.

If you had to write a term paper for this course, you might open with this argument: that in creating the new iPhone 5 ($200 with contract), Apple strengthened its first two advantages — but handed its rivals the third one on a silver platter.

Let’s start with design. The new phone, in all black or white, is beautiful. Especially the black one, whose gleaming, black-on-black, glass-and-aluminum body carries the design cues of a Stealth bomber. The rumors ran rampant that the iPhone 5 would have a larger screen. Would it be huge, like many Android phones? Those giant screens are thudding slabs in your pocket, but they’re fantastic for maps, books, Web sites, photos and movies.

As it turns out, the new iPhone’s updated footprint (handprint?) is nothing like the Imax size of its rivals. It’s the same 2.3 inches wide, but its screen has grown taller by half an inch — 176 very tiny pixels.

It’s a nice but not life-changing change. You gain an extra row of icons on the Home screen, more messages in e-mail lists, wider keyboard keys in landscape mode and a more expansive view of all the other built-in apps. (Non-Apple apps can be written to exploit the bigger screen. Until then, they sit in the center of the larger screen, flanked by unnoticeable slim black bars.)

At 0.3 inch, the phone is thinner than before, startlingly so — the thinnest in the world, Apple says. It’s also lighter, just under four ounces; it disappears completely in your pocket. This iPhone is so light, tall and flat, it’s well on its way to becoming a bookmark.

Second advantage: components. There’s no breakthrough feature this time, no Retina screen or Siri. (Thought recognition will have to wait for the iPhone 13.)

Even so, nearly every feature has been upgraded, with a focus on what counts: screen, sound, camera, speed.

The iPhone 5 is now a 4G LTE phone, meaning that in certain lucky cities, you get wicked-fast Internet connections. (Verizon has by far the most LTE cities, with AT&T a distant second and Sprint at the rear. Here’s a cool coverage comparison map: j.mp/V5wEwN.)

The phone itself runs faster, too. Its new processor runs twice as fast, says Apple. Few people complained about the old phone’s speed, but this one certainly zips.

The screen now has better color reproduction. The front-facing camera captures high-definition video now (720p). The battery offers the same talk time as before (eight hours), but adds two more hours of Web browsing (eight hours), even on LTE networks. In practical terms, you encounter fewer days when the battery dies by dinnertime — a frequent occurrence with 4G phones.

The camera is among the best ever put into a phone. Its lowlight shots blow away the same efforts from an iPhone 4S. Its shot-to-shot times have been improved by 40 percent. And you can take stills even while recording video (1080p hi-def, of course).

So far, so good. But now, the third point, about universal compatibility.

These days, that decade-old iPhone/iPad/iPod charging connector is everywhere: cars, clocks, speakers, docks, even medical devices. But the new iPhone won’t fit any of them.

Apple calls its replacement the Lightning connector. It’s much sturdier than the old jack, and much smaller — 0.31 inch wide instead of 0.83. And there’s no right side up — you can insert it either way. It clicks satisfyingly into place, yet you can remove it easily. It’s the very model of a modern major connector.

Well, great. But it doesn’t fit any existing accessories, docks or chargers. Apple sells an adapter plug for $30 (or $40 with an eight-inch cable “tail”). If you have a few accessories, you could easily pay $150 in adapters for a $200 phone. That’s not just a slap in the face to loyal customers — it’s a jab in the eye.

Even with the adapter, not all accessories work with the Lightning, and not all the features of the old connector are available; for example, you can’t send the iPhone’s video out to a TV cable.

Apple says that a change was inevitable — that old connector, after 10 years, desperately needed an update. Still, Apple has just given away one of its greatest competitive advantages.

The phone comes with new software, iOS 6, bristling with large and small improvements — and it’s a free download that also runs on the iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4 or iPhone 4S.

The chief attractions of iOS 6 are a completely new GPS/maps app (Apple ditched Google Maps and wrote its own app); new talents for Siri, the voice-activated assistant (she now answers questions about current movies, sports and restaurants); and one-tap canned responses to incoming calls (like “I’m driving — call you later”).

There’s a new panorama mode for the camera, too, that comes in handy more often than you might expect. As you swing the phone around you, it stitches many shots together into a seamless, ultra-wide-angle, 28-megapixel photo. Unlike other apps and phones with panorama modes, this one is fully automated and offers a preview of the panorama that materializes as you’re taking it. (For my complete review of iOS 6, see nytimes.com/pogue.)

Should you get the new iPhone, when the best Windows Phone and Android phones offer similarly impressive speed, beauty and features?

The iPhone 5 does nothing to change the pros and cons in that discussion. Windows Phones offer brilliant design, but lag badly in apps and accessories.

Android phones shine in choice: you can get a huge screen, for example, a memory-card slot or N.F.C. chips (near-field communication — you can exchange files with other N.F.C. phones, or buy things in certain stores, with a tap). But Android is, on the whole, buggier, more chaotic and more fragmented — you can’t always upgrade your phone’s software when there’s a new version.

IPhones don’t offer as much choice or customization. But they’re more polished and consistently designed, with a heavily regulated but better stocked app catalog. They offer Siri voice control and the best music/movie/TV store, and the phone’s size and weight have boiled away to almost nothing.

If you have an iPhone 4S, getting an iPhone 5 would mean breaking your two-year carrier contract and paying a painful penalty; maybe not worth it for the 5’s collection of nips and tucks. But if you’ve had the discipline to sit out a couple of iPhone generations — wow, are you in for a treat.

It’s just too bad about that connector change. Doesn’t Apple worry about losing customer loyalty and sales?

Actually, Apple has a long history of killing off technologies, inconveniently and expensively, that the public had come to love — even those that Apple had originally developed and promoted. Somehow, life goes on, and Apple gets even bigger.

So if you wanted to conclude your term paper by projecting the new connector’s impact on the iPhone’s popularity, you’d be smart to write, “very little (sigh).” When you really think about it, we’ve all taken this class before.