The Results of Adding Metadata Might Surprise You

Surprise! You’ll want to add the metadata (your snippet) to more than just your Pinterest graphic. Find out why (and how).

After the Triage

Once you find a blogging friend to act as a triage nurse for your blog, you may discover that some of your social media share buttons don’t work the way you thought they would.

I discovered this recently when I changed my Twitter hashtag from @blestbutstrest to @tips4selfcare. (In case you wonder why I changed, it has to do with looking for a more descriptive handle that better explains what I blog about these days.)

For some reason, I forgot I would need to change the handle in multiple places. Boy, did I get a surprise when I discovered that I’d sent out 20 tweets with my old handle still attached! I also discovered that not all share buttons work the same.

For example, I discovered that JetPack’s share buttons don’t allow you to choose what the tweet says. This surprised me, because JetPack usually leads out in efficiency and innovation.

My remedy? I removed the share buttons from my blog. Instead of relying on their faulty system (which also doesn’t give those who click on them the option of choosing the correctly configured pin for Pinterest), I chose to remove them. I did use their editable message to ask readers to click one of the buttons on the left side of the blog.

I just spent 45 minutes trying to figure out how I got the share buttons to show up on the left side of the blog without any success. I wanted to remove the G+ button, since Google+ no longer exists. Some days, technology use happens seamlessly for me. Other days, like today, I receive a nasty surprise when I can’t make it work. It doesn’t help that I have a horrible case of the hives and feel as twitchy as a leopard in a roomful of rocking chairs.

You Choose: Retreat or Defeat

Those days come along for everyone. I feel like giving up in defeat, but I’ll shelve the problem for now and tackle it when I don’t feel so short-tempered and twitchy. If I can’t figure it out, I’ll ask for help in one of the Facebook blogging communities that I belong to. Kind people in those communities have helped me out of tight spots numerous times.

Back to metadata and where you need to make sure you add it.

Add Metadata to ALL of Your Graphics for a Post

Copy and paste your snippet to ALL the graphics that you’ll insert into a post. You can use the same snippet that you used to fill out the metadata for your Pinterest pin. Don’t forget to use your keyword or keyword strings in the [Title] box.

Add Metadata to the Social Shares

The second place you’ll want to add it might surprise you. If you have the Yoast plug-in (and you should), down at the bottom of each post you’ll see a set of tabs that say [SEO], [Readability], and [Social]. Click on the one that says [Social] and you’ll see a place to change the default graphic that loads for both Facebook and Twitter.

Sometimes, Facebook can surprise me with their crazy changes. It seems like one week they’ll pull the proper photo and snippet, and the next it will go all wonky. For this reason, I make sure to manually select what photo I want to use for both Facebook and Twitter, as well as copy and paste the snippet into the corresponding boxes.

Don’t Forget the Excerpt

You’ll find the third place you’ll want to add your snippet over on the right-hand side of your post composition page. Click up at the top where it says [Document], and scroll down to the [Featured Image] tab to add your featured image, and the [Excerpt] tab to add your snippet to the excerpt.

Before You Hit Publish

Once you finish your post and hit the [Publish] or [Schedule] buttons, you’ll have one more chance to add your snippet (if you have things set up for automatically sharing your posts to Twitter). The default tweet which goes out consists of nothing more than your post’s headline and the URL. Don’t settle for that. Use your snippet (or a shortened version of it) and at least three hashtags.

The Results Might Surprise You

Use your snippet to fill in the metadata on ALL of the graphics you use on each post. Use the same snippet for your social media sharing, your excerpt, and the tweet that goes out when you publish a post.

Discover four places you need to include metadata in order to improve your social sharing. #blogger #write28days #beginner Click To Tweet

Doing this will ensure that you’ve added value to all the possible ways people may feel like sharing your post. I have no official data on how many more people will share your posts because you’ve added value. But it doesn’t hurt to have graphics properly tagged with keywords and hashtags to make it easier for people to find your posts.

Tomorrow we’ll tackle keywords again. This time, whether or not you have to use the exact keyword over and over again in your post in order to rank for SEO. Hopefully, my medication will kick in and hives will subside, and I’ll write with more clarity.