October 28, 2009
Shares Well With Others?
Expect your site to be shared with Facebook users and on other social media platforms? Don't forget to provide page/article appropriate thumbnail and copy.
If you share a page to Facebook, then FB will offer up a preview image to display along with some information about the link. If you add the special tags that are explained in the dev article Facebook Share/Specifying Meta Tags, you gain control over which graphic and which text is shown. If you neglect to do so, then Facebook (and other such sites) will scrape the source page and try to present relevant copy and imagery, often offering up unsuitable content.
About Preview images:
It's important to note that your specified image doesn't need to actually display in the page that is shared. Ideally, the preview image would be related to the content, but for sites w/o dedicated staff perhaps a logo would suffice. As for size, there doesn't seem to be a standard as Facebook and other sites will scale images to fit. That said, I haven't seen any image previews wider than 130px.
