Social Share to Facebook Not Providing Detailed Description of the Blog Post

Overview

The Social Share feature does not provide a detailed description of a Blog post on Facebook. This is because the Social Share feature only passes a link, and it is up to the social media platform to prepare a preview of the link.
In this case, Evoq does not pass an intent/bundle with the page's content to Facebook or any other platform but only serves a link to the shared page. It is up to the social platform scraper to get the information from the page. Therefore, while sharing pages, you need to consider that these scrapers use anonymous sessions, i.e., no credentials. 

This article illustrates the above explanation by providing an example that contains a list of use cases based on the permissions of the page.

Information

Example Use Cases

• If the permission of a page is set to All Users:
  
  

  • The Facebook scraper visits the URL and the page loads without any issues. It will then use the metadata from the page to populate the preview details.
    
    
    

• The permission of a page is set to only Registered Users:
  
  

  • Facebook visits the URL, and it will be prompted with the login page. The scraper will get the metadata from the returned page (login page).
    
    
    

• The permission of the Blog page is set to All Users, but the Blog module is set to only Registered Users:
  
  

  • Facebook visits the URL and the page loads, but the Blog module will not be added to the page as it is only supposed to load for Registered Users. The scraper will get the metadata, which should only contain the information from the Blog page.
    
    
    

• The permission of the Blog page and (all) modules are set to All Users:
  
  

  • The page loads without any issues and includes the Blog module. Now that the Blog module is added to the page, it will inject the metadata (Open Graphic) information from the Blog article into the header of the page. Facebook uses the page metadata and generates a preview that should contain the Blog article information.
    
    
  • The confusion was caused due to the idea that Evoq was sending the Page Data to Facebook to generate the preview. However, it only sends the page URL/Link.
    
    
    NOTE: This is the standard procedure according to the Facebook Developer documentation, and it depends on the Facebook scraper to generate the preview. Furthermore, it is not possible to manually generate the preview data as the field only takes text.
  • Finally, you can confirm this behavior by pasting any link on Facebook and getting a preview of the URL. This should match what an anonymous session (not logged in session) receives.