This is a guest contribution from Beth Hayden.

Ever want to pull your hair out when you try to share one of your posts on Facebook?

Yep. Me too.

When you put you hear and soul into publishing a piece of content on your site, it’s frustrating when you try to share it on Facebook and it shows up in other people’s feeds looking really….well….weird.

Sometimes Facebook shows the wrong image when you share your post. Sometimes it doesn’t show an image at all. Occasionally it grabs the correct image, but crops the photo in an awkward way.

And it’s not just Facebook that frustrates content creators.

Sometimes we have the same problem on Pinterest. Will our readers pin the right image to their boards? Will that image be cropped strangely, or will it be too small to view correctly?

This is not only a common and annoying problem, it’s a big one. If your posts don’t show up the “right way” when people share them on social networking sites, your social shares are going to decrease dramatically.

Here are two examples of how things can go wrong when sharing links on Facebook:

Luckily, there are steps you can take to prevent these types of Facebook headaches.

To take control of how your posts show up on social media, you need to harness the power of social metadata .

Don’t freak out – we’re going to talk about metadata

I’m going to make a confession. My eyes usually glaze over when I hear the word “metadata.”

If you feel the same way, I want you to bear with me for just a bit.

A couple of years ago, I learned some metadata basics so I could perform some (very) simple search optimization on some of my posts. After that, I just didn’t have the patience to sift through confusing and overwhelming jargon about meta descriptions and keywords, so I stuck my head in the sand and hoped metadata would just….go away.

But it turns out, metadata’s more important than ever – so we’ve got to talk about it. But I promise you, I’m going to be brief, clear and practical in this section.

Metadata is simply the key words and updated 2024 mobile phone number data phrases that describe the contents of a particular web page. Essentially, it’s data about data, and when we’re talking about writing blog posts, that means it is data about your blog posts.

Most metadata isn’t easily visible to Einführung in den Kopfschrank für Rechenzentrumsschränke your readers, but it can be detected and read by other websites and tools (like Google’s search crawlers).

If you’ve ever changed the meta description of your post (in order to optimize it for search engines), then you have edited metadata.

The social metadata of a post is designed specifically so social networks like Facebook, Google+, Twitter or Pinterest can detect agb directory and read it. Social metadata determines how your post will appear when people share your content on one of those social networks.