Open graph og:video Meta Tags content
I'm trying to set up a page which can be properly scraped by Facebook when it's shared/liked. The page will have a YouTube video associated with it, so in the content attribute of the og:video tag, should I put the YouTube video embed link or the actual youtube page link for it to appear on Facebook with the little "Preview" button that plays the video in Facebook?
Hope someone can help! Thanks!
Answer
You have two options. You can either set the og:video to https://www.youtube.com/v/YOUTUBECODE or set the og:url to the YouTube page.
In my examples, I'm embedding this video https://www.youtube.com/v/BQBjVr1iHH4 in the following page https://www.keithandthegirl.com/vip/bonus/episode/9/40/this-is-40. I would like Facebook to show the YouTube video whenever anyone shares my page on Facebook.
Option 1: setting the og:video to https://www.youtube.com/v/YOUTUBECODE
The meta tag will look like
<meta property='og:video' content='https://www.youtube.com/v/BQBjVr1iHH4' />
Notice the structure of the YouTube URL is different than the typical URL. You will need to isolate the "v" query from the YouTube link and use it in the og:video link format I showed above. In my example, the value of v is BQBjVr1iHH4.
Option 2: setting the og:url to the YouTube page.
If you don't have the ability to isolate the v code, you can set the og:url tag to the YouTube page. In my example, it would look like this:
<meta property='og:url' content='https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQBjVr1iHH4' />
This will tell Facebook to get the Open Graph tags from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQBjVr1iHH4 and use that in the embed. That means the description and title will come from the YouTube page. However, if someone clicks the link, they'll go to your website.
In my example, if someone pastes the following link while I use the second option https://www.keithandthegirl.com/vip/bonus/episode/9/40/this-is-40 Facebook will see the URL is set to YouTube and query that YouTube link for the OG info. Everything will look like YouTube except the link will click to https://www.keithandthegirl.com/vip/bonus/episode/9/40/this-is-40
One other note: make sure to use https, not http. Facebook will not embed any non-secure video on the site.