Cultivate a Following with Facebook's Open Graph Tags
Facebook has introduced a new avenue for publishers to engage with their audience with Open Graph tags. The new tags will allow you to link your Facebook profile to stories you publish on your websites allowing users to follow and begin to recognize writers/experts themselves.
Setting up the Facebook Open Graph tags is simple. First you'll need to add a line of code to the header tag on a page within your site to automatically implement Open Graph sitewide. A sample of the code looks like this:
<head prefix="og: http://ogp.me/ns# fb: http://ogp.me/ns/fb# article: http://ogp.me/ns/article#"> <meta property="fb:app_id" content="302184056577324" /> <meta property="og:type" content="article" /> <meta property="og:url" content="Put your own URL to the object here" /> <meta property="og:title" content="Sample Article" /> <meta property="og:image" content="https://s-static.ak.fbcdn.net/images/devsite/attachment_blank.png" />
You'll can find full details on the above code as well as other options on Facebook. Once that's in place, you'll need to be sure that the author's Facebook profile is enabled to let users Follow.
During the course of our own tests, we found that after the markup is in place, you should run your page with the Open Graph through Facebook's Debugger in order to ensure it's recognized and correct. We've also verified that once Open Graph are in place, they work on previously published articles as well. So add those tags, enable Follow within your Facebook profile, and start publishing!
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