New Facebook Open Graph tags for writers and publishers

You may be familiar with the Author and Publisher tools which Google+ offer to websites, and now Facebook has added some additional tools for publishers, journalists and writers to boost their content on the social network.

The new Open Graph tags were officially revealed yesterday, and are as follows:

• article:publisher lets a publisher link an article to their own Facebook page. When the article is shared in News Feed, a “like” button is displayed so people can like the publisher page.
• article:author lets a publisher link an article to the Facebook profile of the author. When the article is shared in News Feed, a “follow” button is displayed so people can follow the author. The author needs to have Follow activated on his or her profile for this button to appear.

They are coded as follows:

<meta property="article:publisher" content="https://www.facebook.com/thewayoftheweb" />

<meta property="article:author" content="https://www.facebook.com/danthornton" />

This means ‘Follow’ and ‘Like’ buttons will appear for those who haven’t already followed the author or liked the Publisher page, when that content crops up in their newsfeed.

So well worth implementing to make the most of your visitors sharing your articles and content on social networks.