Facebook Introduces New Open Graph Tags for Media Publishers and More

Facebook has launched two new Open Graph tags to make it easier for people follow their favorite media publishers and journalists. Facebook has also added several new requirements to review your app and Open Graph submissions. They’ve included a few updates to using Facebook Android SDK with ProGuard and the Graph API for event pages posts.

New Open Graph tags for media publishers

According to Facebook’s documentation, media publishers should already be including Open Graph tags in their article’s HTML to generate better previews, or rich snippets of their content when shared on Facebook. Now Facebook provides two more tags for you to include:

• article:publisher allows a publisher to link an article to their own Facebook page. When the article is shared via the News Feed, a “like” button is also displayed so people can like the publisher page

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

• article:author allows a publisher to link an article to the Facebook profile of the author. When the article is shared via the News Feed, a “follow” button is also displayed so people can follow the author. The author needs to have Follow activated on his or her public profile for the button to appear

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

Facebook notes that the “Follow” and “Like” buttons will only appear for people who haven’t already followed the author or liked the publisher page, making the new feature non-intrusive to your current fans.

New requirements for app and Open Graph submissions

Facebook is introducing several new requirements in hopes of making it easier to review your app and Open Graph submissions:

• Apps that use icons that don’t fill the entire space should use a transparent background
• App category is now a required field in order to make it easier for Facebook to surface apps in the App Center and Search
• During the Open Graph submission process, Facebook now requires that you include at least two screenshots of the in-app user flow and one screenshot of what your action will look like when published to timeline

The Facebook SDK and ProGuard in your Android app

If using ProGuard with your Android app, Facebook asks to please add this snippet to your app’s proguard-project.txt configuration file:

-keep class com.facebook.** { *; }
-keepattributes Signature

These flags are used to preserve generic signatures and type information, of which both flags are needed for the Facebook SDK to function correctly in an Android app that uses ProGaurd.

Ability to suppress News Feed stories when creating events for Pages

Now Facebook gives you the ability to suppress the creation of a News Feed story when you create a new event for a Facebook page.

Facebook appears ready to bring more focus to publishers and journalists that create content, and these are welcome updates here at DashBurst! What do you think of the new Open Graph tags or other developments?