Open Graph SMS rich messages on Android and iOS

Question

I am trying to leverage the rich text messages with open graph meta tags. So I have included my meta tags in my website head and it passes all of the Facebook debug and iOS API validation tool.

Yet when I text the link to people either on Android or iOS it doesn't often work. It works typically with Facebook messenger

Does anyone know if this is a cell carrier issue or do I have something configured wrong?

<meta property="fb:app_id" content="********" />
<meta property="og:type" content="website" />
<meta property="og:url" content="https://dameranchdesigns.com/" />
<meta property="og:title" content="Dame Ranch Designs" />
<meta property="og:description" content="Divinely inspired logo graphics and 
website design. A whole new way of being ... on the internet." />
<meta property="og:image"  
content="https://dameranchdesigns.com/images/logos/DRDSunLncropped.png" />

Answer 1

Yetter,

A couple of quick things to help you out here:

1. Apple Support Open Graph for rich SMS messages only since iOS 10+, so make sure that the device you are testing the sent text message to is at least iOS 10 (or higher)

2. Apple only supports og:title and og:image. It ignores the rest (so in your example above, og:description is completely disregarded. Furthermore, if your og:image is a gif image, Apple doesn't support that.

3. Your url in the text message needs to be on it's own "word" meaning there needs to be at least a space between it and any other word in the text. Furthermore, and perhaps most importantly, it needs to specify a scheme, so either: http:// or https://.

4. You can only have one hyperlink to your site with the og:tags. More than one shuts this functionality down.

5. Lastly, I don't believe Android supports such rich messaging functionality in it's SMSs (at least not with Open Graph) -- at least as far as I know as of this writing (Nov-2017). It would be great if they adopted OG as a standard.

So for example These wouldn't work:

• you were invited. You can join on: grapevite.com //no scheme present
• you were invited on http://grapevite.com. Care to join? //Link is between text.

Whereas these would work:

• you were invited on Grapevite. http://grapevite.com
• http://grapevite.com. The world's premier platform for creating, sharing and joining experiences

Reference Reading:

Some sites like these would provide you with some insight as to the above: https://uplandsoftware.com/mobile-messaging/resources/blog/what-ios-10-means-for-mobile-messaging/ https://www.tatango.com/blog/ios-10-what-sms-marketers-need-to-know-and-do/