How BDOW! Share Works
BDOW! (formerly Sumo) Share relies on the content of your webpage to determine exactly what gets shared. This means Share will check your website's HTML to determine what content to share to various social networks.
First, it will check to see if you are using Open Graph Meta tags. You can read more about them here: http://ogp.me/
For example, notice the <meta> tags within the <head> section of the site below. Two <meta> properties have been defined, both an Open Graph Title and an Open Graph URL.
By embedding Open Graph <meta> tags into your site, Share knows exactly which information to share on social networks. (NOTE: Twitter actually has its own meta tags, called Twitter Cards. Because none were defined in the <head> above, the Open Graph tags will be utilized instead.)
If you don't have any Open Graph Meta tags set, Share will try to determine suitable information based off your normal website content, like the title tag and your pages' URL.
What is Open Graph?
The Open Graph protocol enables any web page to become a rich object in a social graph, allowing a degree of control over how information travels from a third-party website to Facebook or other major social networking sites when a page is shared (or liked, etc.). In other words, to turn your web pages into graph objects, you need to add basic metadata to your page (which means that you'll place additional <meta>tags in the <head> of your web page).
An Open Graph Example:
For the purposes of understanding how Share and Open Graph interact, consider the example <head> tags below. Share looks for Open Graph Meta Tags in between the <head> tags of your website. If it cannot find any, like in the example below, it will use your current URL by default.
However, if you are to add Open Graph meta tags, like in the image below, you can completely customize the URL that Share will use.
Meta tags used in the example above:
1 og:title: this is the title of your object as it should appear within the graph, e.g., "Sumo".
2 og:url: this the Canonical URL of your object that will be used as its permanent ID in the graph, e.g., "http://www.sumo.com".
3 og:image: this is the image URL which should represent your object within the graph.
More information can be found here
Twitter Card Tags
With Twitter Cards, you can attach rich photos, videos and media experience to Tweets that drive traffic to your website. This is essentially the same principle as adding Open Graph meta tags to your site. Simply add a few lines of HTML to your webpage and users who Tweet links to your content will have a “Card” added to the Tweet that’s visible to all of their followers.
It is important to note that Twitter Cards are used in lieu of Open Graph tags. In other words, when your site is being shared to Twitter through BDOW! Share, Share checks your site for any Twitter Cards embedded in the HTML before it checks for Open Graph Tags.
For example, notice the <meta> tags within <head> of the site below. Two title <meta> properties have been defined, one open graph title tag and one twitter:title twitter card.
Now let's take a look at when we go to share our site to Twitter. Check that out! The twitter:title twitter card takes precedence over the Open Graph title tag, but still uses the Open Graph URL because there is not a twitter:url defined.
For Twitter we support the following Twitter card tags:
<meta name="twitter:title" content="BDOW">
<meta name="twitter:creator" content="@username">
<meta name="twitter:site" content="@username">
<meta name="twitter:url" content="http://www.BDOW.com">
Lost Your Share Counts?
BDOW! (formerly Sumo) Share relies on your Open Graph tags to determine what your share numbers are. If you don't have Open Graph tags setup, it will use your actual page URL/Title. If you've made changes to your pages' URLs (e.g. switching from http:// to https://) your Open Graph tags may have changed as well.
To get your share numbers back the way they were, you will need to modify your Open Graph URL tag (og:url) to reflect the previous URL where your pages were located. You can do this by locating your existing og:url tags and changing them back to http:// OR if you do not already have og:url tags, you will want to add them and set them up to use http://.
LinkedIn Content Caching
If you make changes to your Open Graph tags and notice that your changes are not being reflecting when sharing to LinkedIn, it is important to note that the first time that LinkedIn's crawlers visit a URL of your website via Share, the data it finds (Open Graph values) will be cached for a period of approximately 7 days.
For example, if you change the article name, image, or title, Shares to LinkedIn will not reflect those changes until the cache has expired and the crawler is forced to revisit the page to retrieve fresh content.
URLs to Check Share Numbers
BDOW! Share pulls its stats directly from the social networks, so they're 100% accurate.
If you were using another share plugin or using another reporting service, a lot of them will log clicks as shares, which would allow incomplete shares to be counted (people who click share then cancel when they are at the share window).
However, if you are confused as to why you may be seeing some numbers, below is a list of useful URLS:
For Facebook, to verify what it's seeing and why specific information is being shared, use their debug tool:
Once there you will want to add your URL then click "Debug".
Once your information loads you can verify what's being pulled. If and when you make updates you will want to click "Fetch new scrape information". You may need to do this a couple of times in case it does not update all of your information in a single scrape.
If the G+ numbers are fluctuating, that is a known problem with Google. Their response is to wait a few hours to "settle down".
To verify your numbers check here:
Additionally, if you are using mobile or secure http, you may notice that most Social Networks counts canonical URL's like
"?m=1"
"https://"
as different URL's and it will not include into your share count. If you're currently already using this meta tag, make sure its using the the URL that you want to be counted. Here's an example of how to add a canonical HTML code:
<meta property="og:url" content="http://theURLyouwantused.com"/>
Other Useful URLs