Facebook – How to Get Pictures to Appear When Posting a Link

Facebook will use any open graph meta tags if present for the title, and image etc (eg, og:title). The facebook documentation for Open Graph Protocol explains this in more detail:

The Open Graph protocol defines four required properties:

og:title - The title of your object as it should appear within the graph, e.g., "The Rock".

og:type - The type of your object, e.g., "movie". See the complete list of supported types.

og:image - An image URL which should represent your object within the graph. The image must be at least 50px by 50px and have a maximum aspect ratio of 3:1.

og:url - The canonical URL of your object that will be used as its permanent ID in the graph, e.g., http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0117500/.

In addition, we've extended the basic meta data to add two required fields to connect your page with Facebook:

og:site_name - A human-readable name for your site, e.g., "IMDb".

fb:admins or fb:app_id - A comma-separated list of either Facebook user IDs or a Facebook Platform application ID that administers this page. It is valid to include both fb:admins and fb:app_id on your page.

It's also recommended that you include the following property as well as these multi-part properties.

og:description - A one to two sentence description of your page.

I'm not sure how they do it for pages lacking these tags. If you're trying to duplicate this functionality then this is no help, sorry. But if you're trying to ensure your pages show up in the Publisher as you want then maybe this will.

You can also use the facebook opengraph debugger, which will provide info about your preview as well as (super handy) update their cached link if you make changes. Otherwise you can make changes to a link you want to share and the changes will not show up for days:

https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug

I don't think G+ (or any other) will delete your content.

I think there is a best practice somewhere that says "do not delete anything" (at least this is how I learned database design), it's just like in nature "nothing is lost, everithing is recycled". :)

They rely on content—think of Google search—sometimes it seems that it knows what you want to search, beacause the more users search, their database grows bigger and bigger, the more database searches that can compare with the more precise is the result. This is true for social media to, they build a profile for every user, and they build the so called "social graph" of the world (read this interview). :)

What they do with the results... first they are showing custom ads, I think they even sale the results to big companies—they have data that is extremly valuable in marketing. For example: a phone company launches 2 new models, m1 and m2, after a few weeks they go to G+, Facebook, and ask them, what is the phone that users talk more m1 or m2, and what phone from a competitor is on top of users talks?

So you need to know that every time you register to a service like this, ALL your data will be stored forever by the company, be it G+, Facebook... you name it.

That's my opinion.