Sharing Best Practices

We want news sites, magazines, blogs, and other media sites to easily reach their existing fans and grow their fan base. This way, people can get the most engaging Facebook experience.
Here’s what you can do:
  1. Learn who your users are and what they want to share
  2. Make sure the Facebook Crawler can access your site
  3. Use proper Open Graph tags to drive distribution
  4. Optimize your image sizes to generate great previews
  5. Use our debug tool to debug your Open Graph Tags
  6. Encourage your content creators to turn on Follow

1. Learn what people want to share

Having great content is necessary, but it’s not the only thing that gets people to share your content.
Track the success of your content with Facebook Insights. You can view the reach of particular stories, understand the demographics of who is sharing and engaging with your content and optimize future efforts based on this understanding. This data is available online and through an API for developers.

2. Facebook Crawler access

The Facebook Crawler fetches content from your site and generates a preview for people on Facebook. When someone shares a URL on Facebook and Likes or Recommends a page on your site using a plugin, it activates the Facebook Crawler. If your content is publicly available, we should have no problem accessing it.
If your content requires someone to login or if you restrict access after some amount of free content has been consumed, you will need to enable access for the Facebook Crawler. This access is only used to generate previews, and Facebook will not publicly expose your private content.
There are two methods to give Facebook’s Crawler access to your content:
  1. IP whitelisting, which is more secure, but requires upkeep
  2. User agent whitelisting, which is less secure, but requires little to no upkeep)

IP whitelisting

Your engineers can allow the following IP addresses access to pages that would otherwise be inaccessible to the public.
31.13.24.0/21
31.13.64.0/18
66.220.144.0/20 
69.63.176.0/20 
69.171.224.0/19 
74.119.76.0/22 
103.4.96.0/22 
173.252.64.0/18 
204.15.20.0/22
2401:db00::/32 
2620:0:1c00::/40 
2a03:2880::/32
Please note that these IP ranges can and do change regularly, so you should periodically run the following command to receive an updated list
whois -h whois.radb.net -- '-i origin AS32934' | grep ^route