I have a list of links, tricks, hacks and tools for social media marketers that I use daily to do my job. These tools can help preview metadata, refresh what is cached and simply can help you find who is sharing your content. You’ll want to bookmark this page as I will continue to update it as I find more helpful tools.
Facebook Debugger
I stumbled on this tool because we had an error with the title of a post in Facebook—as people shared the article the error kept on popping up in people’s social feed even after we corrected it. If you do make a change to your metadata on a post (like a new featured image/headline/description), simply go to the Facebook Debugger and drop in the URL and click the Debug button.
You’ll then want to scroll down and click Scrape Again and verify that your new image/headline/description is showing up correctly on Facebook—you may have to click Scrape Again button a couple of times. This will then dynamically update all the metadata for your link across the Facebook platform. So even though there was a typo in the headline when your buddy Frank shared the article an hour ago, it’ll now be updated to the correct metadata.
Another reason for using this tool is right when a new post goes live. Rather than waiting for Facebook to crawl your website to “cache” the new metadata (that is pull it into it’s system), manually entering the URL into the Facebook Debugger will ensure all the metadata is there from the first share. This eliminates that awkward link share that doesn’t include a picture that you sometimes see on Facebook.
https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/
Twitter Card Validator
One of the best things you can do for your web content is to ensure that you are tagging it to be shared as a Twitter Card (this is a blog post I need to write). But you may want to see how the card will render on users devices—this is where the Twitter Card Validator comes in. Simply drop the link and you can see how the image will look on a tweet. Note that this metadata is “automagically” pulled in by Twitter and is hugely advantageous because (1) the image doesn’t count against your character count and (2) the image is “clickable,” directing users to your website rather than the photo light box.
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I use the Twitter Card Validator primarily for three different reasons. The first is to verify that the website has Twitter Cards set up (if not, you can create them manually in your ads dashboard). The second is to verify that the featured image looks good (if not, you can request your blog editor/web team to tag a different image). The final reason to modify the headline/image due to an error in already shared tweets. This is verify similar to the use case of the Facebook Debugger.
For example, we had a blog article recently that had a featured image of an elephant and it turns out that one of its “legs” was another piece of anatomy. Rather than having an elephant dong posted all over Twitter, we swapped it out for the above image of an elephant spraying water. By taking that URL and running it through the Twitter Card Validator, we were able to update the image on all the previously shared tweets. (Side note: this is a funny post from my VP about the elephant dong.)
https://cards-dev.twitter.com/validator
Discover Who’s Pinned Your Posts
Curious who has pinned your posts on Pinterest? It’s easy to do, just go to https://www.pinterest.com/source/yourdomain.com.
Simply replace “yourdomain.com” with your actual URL and you can see all the articles that people have repinned, giving you the opportunity to like them and build that reputation with those users. Here’s an example of what it looks like for all the posts pinned from my blog about San Antonio called SA Flavor.
https://www.pinterest.com/source/yourdomain.com
See What Reddit Has to Say
Similar to the Pinterest example, you can also see what the folks on Reddit have to say about your website. Go to https://www.reddit.com/domain/yourdomain.com/
Simply replace “yourdomain.com” with your actual URL and you can see all the articles that people have posted to Reddit. But more interesting than what was posted to Reddit is the comments as they are often a (very) unfiltered view into what people think about your site or brand. Be warned though: you need to have a thick skin if you are going to get involved on Reddit. And never feed the trolls.
https://www.reddit.com/domain/yourdomain.com
Find Out Who’s Tweeted Your Article
Even if folks don’t tag you in a tweet, you can still see who has posted your article on twitter. Go to the Twitter Search page and drop in your domain. And if you’re curious about a particular article, you can place that in the search bar to get results for just that page.
There are a couple of things to note though. First, be sure to click the “Live” tab to see all the current results. Second, Twitter clears out the results after a set amount of time (I think it is 30 days). They do, however, move some of the “better” results to the “Top” tab and archive them.
https://twitter.com/search-home
Find Out How Many Clicks That Bit.ly Got
One of the things I love to do is to understand how influential a person is on social media. Throw out the Klout score, what I care about is if a person’s followers take action. And if that person uses Bit.ly as a link shortener, it’s pretty easy to do. All you have to do is add a “+” to the end of the bit.ly link to see how many clicks it has garnered. For example, let’s look at this tweet from HEB:
Remember Hi-C Ecto Cooler? It's back and now available online in time for #Ghostbusters. https://t.co/7aQNRfBDMf pic.twitter.com/9eitohas7D
— H-E-B (@HEB) June 14, 2016
To see how many tweets their link has received, all you have to do is go to http://bit.ly/HEBGBusterTW+. This will take you to the bit.ly backend where you can not only see how many people clicked that link, but also see any other shortened links for this webpage. Checking bit.ly links is definitely one of my guilty pleasures.
Add a “+” to the end of any bit.ly link
Know of any other tricks that I should include in this blog post? Be sure to let me know in the comments. Follow Garrett on Twitter at @pinojo and sign up to the Marketing Bytes newsletter here! Image by David DeHoey via Flickr CC.