Sharing on Facebook

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  justintsimpson · Member · Jan 13, 2015 at 3:54 pm

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  Hey there.

  Something seems off about how WordPress shares to Facebook. Lately when I make a new post, the auto-share works nicely but what it shares is lacking on the Facebook side. I have a screenshot to show that what is shared is a snippet of text, a photo, and a link to the WordPress app on Facebook, neither of which actually links to the actual post. It appears more as a status that I’ve authored on Facebook rather than a link to my actual post. This can’t be correct.

  I will gladly pass along what I’m seeing if needed, please just let me know.

  Thanks!

  The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)

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  shawnajroberts · Member · Jan 13, 2015 at 10:49 pm

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  Being able to see what you’re talking about would be a great help. Can you upload that image to your Media Library? A link to the associated post would help too.

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  justintsimpson · Member · Jan 14, 2015 at 2:28 am

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  Alright – thanks for responding! I’ve uploaded a screenshot of what happens on Facebook when my post auto-shares. As you can see, there’s no link to the actual post, just two links to the WordPress Facebook app.

  The post in question is here:
  https://justintsimpson.wordpress.com/2015/01/12/i-finally-made-meatloaf-aka-close-enoughloaf/

  But this is the case for everything I auto-share during publish. Sharing the link manually works beautifully but the auto-share feature just doesn’t seem to do what it should.

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  shawnajroberts · Member · Jan 14, 2015 at 10:46 pm

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  Hmm. I’m not sure why that’s happening. Let me do some testing with your theme to see if its something there triggering it. Facebook decides what to do with our shares differently depending on the content of the post and the post type, but yours look pretty normal.

  As an aside while I work on that, if you have more than 15 tags and categories, we won’t show your post under the Reader tags. Its a good idea to focus your tags so that users can easily search for your content.

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  justintsimpson · Member · Jan 15, 2015 at 4:24 pm

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  Noted, thanks!

  I appreciate you looking into this! The 2-3 people that actually read my blog are depending on you! :-)

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  justintsimpson · Member · Jan 16, 2015 at 11:09 pm

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  Heyyyy so…

  I was thinking about what you said about excessive tags so I thought that maybe that was what was making Facebook treat my sharing so poorly. Upon testing I found that the excessive tags aren’t the culprit but tagging in general appears to be.

  Each test publish I did that included tags numbering anywhere from 1 to 26 would publish to Facebook with no links to the blog. HOWEVER, if I published with no tags whatsoever, the share worked perfectly.

  That’s obviously not desirable and I’m sure you can dig in further than that but for the time being I have no problem just omitting tags until after my initial publish just for sharing sake.

  Thanks again for checking into this!

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  shawnajroberts · Member · Jan 20, 2015 at 5:31 am

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  Sweet! I’m glad you stumbled across that. :) I’m just headed off for the night, but I’ll dig into testing this again in the morning and get it reported to our developers. We often have very little control over how Facebook interprets our shares, but from a cursory glance, this sounds like something we can fix.