So I put my horse on the Internet, now what?

You finally blocked off 20 minutes on a Monday to get your sale horse online. You collected all the media, dug up the USEF number, dutifully filled in the registration boxes, and paid for a sale horse listing on a standalone website.

Now what?

Tell people.

You, dear user, are mighty. You, as a person and not a brand, are favored by the algorithm. You hold the power on social media. We may have 28K Facebook fans but only a few dozen are shown our content, and the rates Meta charges for eyeballs grows steadily each year. Plus, no one likes ads in their feeds, so online audiences have conditioned themselves to scroll past posts from businesses. That’s okay, we’re not offended. We do it too. 

So share an Instagram story with the link option, show your horse their online listing in a quirky TikTok, and dust off your old Facebook account. Because while Facebook has about a million downsides, networking sale horses is not one of them.

Recently, a client logged over 1000 views within 24 hours simply by posting her listing link to a handful of Facebook groups. The views flowed for days, because links can be clicked long after they’re left behind. The post was simple and to the point, nothing creative or enigmatic. For our business page to get the same results? I’d have to ride the horse backwards in a tutu while decoupaging a vase and insulting the crest release.

But none of that nonsense was required for our client to gain that kind of traction. Simply a sentence and an effective link preview and voila! Multiple inquiries in the first week.

Hacking the link preview

You’re on a roll. You’ve jumped through the hoops and have a sale ad to share. You log on to Facebook, write a few words, paste your link, click publish and… oof. There sits a poorly chosen photo and a generic website title that lacks any pertinent details. Or worse, no link preview shows at all. Just a sad, randomly assigned gobbledygook URL offering no explanation. 

Enter Meta's Sharing Debugger. This nifty tool gives Facebook a heads-up that there’s a new page on the internet. Their robots scrape the webpage, gather its title, description, and photo (metadata), and show you exactly how your link will look when posted.

Metadata are the bread crumbs we websites leave for the good bots, the bots who use data to catalog information and serve it up to the people looking for it. It’s customizable and can be quite granular, so we pack it full of the basics buyers need to know.

Every listing launched at hj.exchange goes through the Debugger so we can confirm that the metadata is correct and the page is ready to share. Links are also shortened with our vanity URL for the tidiest possible presentation when posted to social media:

There’s no denying that social media continues to absorb much of the web’s natural traffic, or that a dominant social media presence now rivals a top Google result in terms of market visibility. Smart sellers will use both channels to their advantage: Social media to funnel shoppers in, and a gorgeous sale horse listing to convert them to phone calls.