An important aspect to building a brand identity is controlling the brand. Large companies have entire documents defining the logo, colors, verbiage, etc. of their brand. However, it is often the little things that get overlooked. In social media there is a multitude of ways to disseminate and support your brand; this is about one small way that could have a big impact.
Anyone who has posted a link on Facebook has seen the thumbnail that shows up associated with the link and site blurb. You may notice that it will often give you options to pick the thumbnail you want. You may have even noticed that oftentimes the company’s logo or any relevant picture is not in the list. Where do the blurbs and thumbnails come from, and can you control what thumbnail is associated with your site?
The most basic thing that Facebook does is simply read your page. You should already have a “description” meta tag for SEO, and that is used as the blurb. Any images embedded on the page (through img tags – not included in CSS as backgrounds, etc.) will go into the thumbnail list. You may try to trick Facebook by including a picture but obscuring it, etc., but there is a much easier and reliable way to do this.
The answer is through Facebook meta tags, made available in the Open Graph protocol. With those meta tags, not only can you specify a picture for a thumbnail, but you can specify real-world location information, your site name, description (that blurb), and more.
There are four required meta tags to make use of the Open Graph: title, type, url, and image. To specify the thumbnail, you need to include the following meta tag in the head section of your html:
<meta property=”og:image” content=”imageurl” />
You can even include multiple instances of this tag to give multiple thumbnail choices. You could change the image seasonally, for promotions, or just to keep your brand current. The tags override the automatic thumbnail production based on the images on your page. Also, note that the first thumbnail shown will be the largest image in the list, so make sure your primary message is the largest image. This will ensure that when someone shares a link to your site, instead of a random or even unrelated image, the message, brand, or logo you want to portray is there.
Read more about the Open Graph protocol, available meta tags, and image parameters at http://developers.facebook.com/docs/opengraph
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