Facebook og:type meta-tags - should I just make up my own?

Question

I'm putting the required meta-tags into my pages and I have a list I saved from facebook's documentation at https://developers.facebook.com/docs/opengraph/#types

Two problems. One is that my list of business types is, in total:

• bar
• company
• cafe
• hotel
• restaurant

which is a little crazy. Every type of commercial entity in the world can be categorised as one of those five things? There's not even "store"?

That list is confirmed by this page: http://www.netmagazine.com/tutorials/optimise-your-website-facebook but my second problem is, Facebook no longer seems to be providing a list at all. The documentation says it was updated a month ago.

The tutorial holds out the interesting promise that "Facebook says that it will actively monitor the most commonly used types and add them to the list of supported og:types in due course." so it seems I can make up my own, say "store" or "supermarket" and that won't be an error.

What good or harm will it do to make up my own? What does Facebook use this metadata for anyway?

Solution

According to the .NET link article you provided, these are the types you can use:

Activities

activity
sport

Businesses

bar
company
cafe
hotel
restaurant

Groups

cause
sports_league
sports_team

Organizations

band
government
non_profit
school
university

People

actor
athlete
author
director
musician
politician
profile
public_figure

Places

city
country
landmark
state_province

Products and Entertainment

album
book
drink
food
game
movie
product
song
tv_show

Websites

article
blog
website

Now, the list is limited of course, but you can keep it generic by stating something like og:type="website" - it may sound stupid and obvious stating website as the type, but remember tht the web isn't just about web pages - there are all sorts of media to consume.

Or, as you mention, make up your own. If you're sensible about it and specify something like og:type="ecommerce", over time, this may be something others are using and will therefore become a popular choice; with the hope it becomes adopted. If it doesn't, then there's no actual harm that can come of it.

In reality, it doesn't matter what you put there and I suspect Facebook only specifies these types because it wants to know what it's working with for its advertising activities.

But Facebook isn't the only medium that will use these tags, so don't be locked into their methods only. It's best to keep it logical and sensible.

Hope this helps.