There is a version of your best piece of content
that appears on LinkedIn with the wrong image, a truncated title, and a meta description that is, word for word, the first sentence of the post.
It’s been appearing that way for every share, on every platform, since the day you published it.
Nobody set this up intentionally. Nobody noticed. The SEO plugin picked up whatever defaults it had, the theme provided whatever fallback image was configured, and the result has been presenting your carefully-written content in the worst possible packaging every time a reader tries to recommend it.
This is the Open Graph problem, and it is almost entirely an editorial oversight.
What Open Graph actually does
Open Graph is the metadata layer that controls how your content appears when it’s shared on social platforms — the title, description, and image that Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and other platforms use to generate the preview card.
It was developed by Facebook in 2010 and is now the standard that virtually every social platform reads. When someone shares a link to your site, the platform fetches the Open Graph metadata from your page and uses it to build the preview. If the metadata is good, the preview is good. If the metadata is defaults and accidents, the preview is defaults and accidents.
The title and meta description you optimize for search engines is visible in the SERP. The Open Graph title and description is what your readers see when they share your content with their networks. These are not the same thing, and they don’t have to be.
What bad Open Graph looks like in practice
The image problem is the most visible. If you haven’t specified an og:image for your posts, the platform will pull whatever image it finds first on the page — often the logo, sometimes a random thumbnail, sometimes nothing at all, which results in a gray placeholder.
The title problem is subtler. Many sites use their SEO title (optimized for search) as the og:title without considering that the social context is different. A title that works in a SERP — where someone is actively searching for information — doesn’t always work in a social feed, where someone is scrolling. The social title is competing for attention in a different context.
The description problem is the one that bothers me most: the meta description that was written for the SERP being used verbatim as the social description. Or, worse, the absence of any meta description causing the platform to use the first paragraph of the post body — which often starts with something like “In this article, we’ll be covering…” or “If you’re looking for…” which is not a reason to click.
This is a publishing decision
Every piece of content you publish should have three distinct copywriting elements: the headline for the page (the H1), the SEO title for the SERP, and the Open Graph title for social sharing. These can overlap significantly — and often the best option is to align them closely — but they should be set deliberately, not defaulted.
The same applies to the image. Every shareable piece of content should have a designated og:image — an image sized appropriately for social platforms (1200×630 pixels is the current standard), selected or created to be compelling as a standalone visual, and matched to the content it represents.
This is editorial work. It’s the same discipline as writing a good headline: understanding the context, the audience, and the goal, and crafting a short piece of copy that earns the click.
The audit and the fix
The audit is simple: paste your five most important URLs into Facebook’s Sharing Debugger or LinkedIn’s Post Inspector. Look at what shows up. If you wince, you have work to do.
The fix is adding Open Graph metadata to your posts — a specific og:title, og:description, and og:image for each major piece of content. Most SEO plugins (including Yoast) have a dedicated Social tab where you can set these values independently from your SEO metadata.
For new posts, add Open Graph fields to your pre-publish checklist. For existing posts, start with the ones that get shared most frequently — your highest-traffic posts, your case studies, your pillar content. Fix those first. The return on improving the packaging of your most-shared content is immediate and compounding: every future share is better than every past one.
The content is good. The packaging has been embarrassing it. Fix the packaging.
HOWTO Steps: audit current OG → set og:title → set og:description → set og:image.
Jacob Clifton is the principal of Clifton Creative, an editorial strategy consultancy based in Austin, Texas. He spent fourteen years as a flagship staff writer at Television Without Pity and has written for Tor.com, Vulture, BuzzFeed News, and the Austin Chronicle.
For inquiries:
jacob@cliftoncreative.agency · cal.com/cliftoncreative