Control data published to Facebook via JFBConnect?

I'm not entirely sure I understand what I'm looking at, so I may not express my problem correctly -- I'll try to be succinct...

My site is for a parrot and exotic bird rescue. When I manually post pages to Facebook (the pages show a particular parrot that is available for adoption, along with information about the bird), I get the photo and title as I would expect. Below though, in the details section, I get some very non user-friendly information that is lifted from the page that was posted from the site, as you can see below:

The formatting is from JReviews -- don't know if there is a way to get that formatting to show up as it does on the page, but if I can't it's not a really big deal. What I'm wondering though is, short of getting the formatting to show up on Facebook as it does on the page (via JReviews), can I choose to have JFBConnect post the Meta Description or some other information that is a little more attractive to anybody looking at the post?

I don't really care if the user can't see the JReviews format on the facebook post -- they'll see it on the page if they click the link... but I'd like the post to look a little more informative if there's any possible way to do it.

So far I'm thrilled with the potential of this product! I only have it working with Facebook at the moment, but if I can get this to work with multiple social media apps at the same time, it will be a monumental time saver!

Thanks for your help.

What a very interesting answer! It would have never occurred to me that Facebook was "scraping," ala Google. I would have thought the data going into the link would have been "live" (ie: taken from the metadata or, as I thought in this case, some of the unformatted -- or misunderstood data on the live page).

I really have to get my mind around this whole Open Graph thing... I have tried, but I can't find any layman description of how it works from the foundation up -- it gets so caught up in jargon so quickly that I'm lost before I even know what I'm looking at. If you can recommend a good, simple tutorial on Open Graph, I'm all ears.

In the meantime, thank you so much for once again solving my problem!!!

Welll... I thought I understood this, but I guess I don't.

I just posted another page and I get the same results with the unsightly stuff in the description. I went to the debugger and looked at it, then chose to re-scrape. No change.

When I load the page and look at the source, I do not see an og: description tag anywhere on the page. Where does that come from? Is it auto-generated or can I put it in manually somehow.

Also, as an aside, If I'm understanding you correctly on your diagnosis of the first page... while Facebook is seeing it properly now, I'd have to repost the article to facebook in order to get it to show up correctly, right?

I guess I'm trying to figure out how I can get the og: description tag to populate properly PRIOR to posting so It shows up right the first time

alzander wrote:

When I load the page and look at the source, I do not see an og: description tag anywhere on the page. Where does that come from? Is it auto-generated or can I put it in manually somehow.

JFBConnect should automatically try to insert an og:description tag into the page. By default, we just copy the meta description into the og:description tag. If you have an Open Graph plugin enabled for the component page you are viewing, then JFBConnect can generate a better description.. for instance, on a Joomla article, there are settings for choosing the meta description, the introtext to an article or the fulltext of an article.

You can control the OG description on any page directly by adding the following block of code anywhere in the content of the page:

{SCOpenGraph description=My great description for the page}

If that tag is on the page, JFBConnect will use it above all else.

I have done two test posts. One of the pages has the og: description tag and the other one does not. I'm not sure why this is, but even after re-scraping both articles several ties, several days ago, the undesirable text is still on the Facebook page (even though the og: description tag on the one page shows the desired information.) I'll play around with the information you've given me and see if I can come up with a reliable way to get the desired text. The plugin route sounds like the easiest.

alzander wrote:

Also, as an aside, If I'm understanding you correctly on your diagnosis of the first page... while Facebook is seeing it properly now, I'd have to repost the article to facebook in order to get it to show up correctly, right?

No, once Facebook's cache is updated, old posts in your stream should be updated automatically.

Not sure how frequently Facebook's cache is updated, but I'm not seeing anything yet...

I'll keep plugging away at this. Thank you for the information.

Update:

Still having trouble getting the og: description tag to show up in my pages. I did discover that the opengraph plugins were NOT active, so they are now, but still getting the same undesirable output in the description as you see in the first post on this thread. I thought perhaps another component might be interfering -- the only one I can find that might be is MijoSEF. I have done everything I can think of to take it out of the mix as it pertains to this problem and still nothing.

I haven't tried using the [code} {SCOpenGraph description=My great description for the page} [/code] yet, but even if it works, it's going to more or less force me to put the meta description into the page a second time, which is not really optimal at all.

Any other ideas as to why the og: description information isn't making it into the pages?

Also, using {SCOpenGraph description= Description} does not seem to be making its way to the page... so even with that code snippet added to the article, I get no change.