Social Sharing

Under the Hood

Whenever a page on your site is shared on Facebook and Twitter, those sites scrape the page to look for relevant information to generate a nice looking preview to add to their feeds. The process entails looking for titles, images, publisher info and more. If that information is not found in the expected format, then the preview won't necessarily use the information you want.

JReviews automatically adds the needed Facebook Open Graph and Twitter Card tags to listing detail pages, so you see exactly what you want when content is shared on Facebook and Twitter.

An Auto-tweet feature is also available, allowing you to sit back, and relax, knowing that whenever new content is posted on your site, it's also going to be shared on Twitter automatically, or upon approval in the moderation queue.

Social Sharing Buttons

You can choose with social sharing buttons to show on listing detail pages in Configuration → Social Sharing Social → Networks. You'll find options there for:

• FB Share
• FB Like
• Twitter
• LinkedIn
• Pinterest

The same settings are available in each listing type if you wish to override them there.

Enabling these buttons is not enough to optimize the sharing experience. which can happen even without these buttons, when you or someone else pastes a link to one of your listings on a social network.

Optimizing the sharing experience requires specific meta tags to be added to the page, and for that to happen it's necessary to setup a few things for Facebook and Twitter. Both LinkedIn and Pinterest are able to read Open Graph tags to optimize the sharing experience on their networks.

Facebook Open Graph Tags

Facebook recommends adding Open Graph tags to create nice post previews in the Facebook feed. Below you can find a couple of useful links:

• A Guide to Sharing for Webmasters
• Sharing Debugger

To get started go to Configuration → Social Sharing:

• Enable Open Graph Tags should be set to Yes
• Optionally add a Facebook App ID and secret to let FB know about listing changes. Typically FB caches a page, so new photos, and other changes won't be immediately reflected when sharing the listing

Next, go to each of your listing types, Social Sharing tab and fill out the Facebook Open Graph Object Type:

Twitter Cards

Twitter recommends adding Twitter Card tags to be able to create nice looking previews in the Twitter feed. Below you can find a couple of useful links:

• Optimize Tweets with Cards
• Twitter Card Validator Requires login to Twitter account

To get started go to Configuration → Social Sharing:

• The Summary Card is selected by default, but you can choose a different one, or completely disable cards
• Add your Twitter username, like @getJReviews
• If you prefer to have dynamic usernames for each listing, you can connect the username with a text custom field with the Twitter Username Listing Custom Field settting

You can also override the card type and the default username for each listing type in the listing type's Social Sharing tab.

Auto Tweets

Auto Tweet functionality allows you to automate posting content to Twitter whenever a new listing, review, review comment or photo is published on your site. Choose the type of content you want to have automatically posted and also add hashtags to include in the Tweet. The hashtags can be set globally, or they can be different for each listing type.

To setup the AutoTweet functionality go to Configuration → Social Sharing → Twitter integration and enable Auto Tweets. You can also select the type of content you want to have automatically posted.

It's also necesasry to Setup Twitter Authentication. For this you need to create an application on the Twitter Developers site. Choose read and write access and copy the consumer and access token values to the JReviews settings shown below.

Content that's held for moderation will be posted to Twitter once approved in the administration moderation queue.

Auto Tweet URL Shortening

The text included in messages posted to Twitter will include links to categories, listings and reviews. To automatically shroten these URLs setup the Bit.ly integration under Configuration → Social Sharing. If you don't already have a Bit.ly account, first sign-up, then create under Profile Setting generate a Generic Access Token to use in the JReviews configuration.