youtube-video auto-published to facebook, but won't play inside fb

When you share a post on Facebook, or when Jetpack Publicize publishes a post to your Facebook page, Facebook crawls the page and looks for Open Graph meta tags in the head to build a complete post preview (with an image, title, description, …).

Jetpack automatically creates these Open Graph Meta tags for you unless you already use another Open Graph plugin, in which case we let the other plugin handle things.

You can see what Facebook sees by entering one of your posts’ URLs in Facebook Debugger:
https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug

If you use Jetpack’s Open Graph Meta Tags, Jetpack will add the necessary meta tags for the video to be displayed and played on Facebook, but that will only happen if the video is the main content of your post; we wouldn’t want to display the video as Facebook post preview if your post were in fact a long essay with a video at the end, for example. ??

If you use another plugin to manage Open Graph Meta Tags, I’d suggest checking those tags using the tool I mentioned above, and get in touch with the plugin author if you think the tags could be better or different.

I hope this clarifies things a bit.

Hello Jeremy,

thank you for your detailed description!

I tried your suggestions.

The video is the first thing in that post with additional text as a description and message to the readers/viewers.

FB debugger shows 3 errors:

Inferred Property
The 'og:image' property should be explicitly provided, even if a value can be inferred from other tags.
Inferred Property
The 'og:image' property should be explicitly provided, even if a value can be inferred from other tags.
Share App ID Missing
The 'fb:app_id' property should be explicitly provided, Specify the app ID so that stories shared to Facebook will be properly attributed to the app. Alternatively, app_id can be set in url when open the share dialog.

I don’t know what is wrong with it, do you?

I looked for plugins which could have to do something with OpenGraph and I found Yoast SEO to be one of them, but I’m not sure if this is the only plugin (but seems to be), because there are 44 plugins from which are 36 active on this site.

If Yoast SEO is the only plugin “prohibiting” facebook to crawl the post to be able to play the included video, would it be sufficient to deactivate Open Graph Meta Data functionality in Yoast SEO? I asked because this cannot be tested so quickly.

Does Publicize offer to not bypass its Open Graph functionality? So other plugins offering Open Graph functionality are being stopped?

Inferred Property
The ‘og:image’ property should be explicitly provided, even if a value can be inferred from other tags.

This sounds like no Open Graph Meta Tags are displayed on your site at the moent.

If Yoast SEO is the only plugin “prohibiting” facebook to crawl the post to be able to play the included video, would it be sufficient to deactivate Open Graph Meta Data functionality in Yoast SEO?

I’m not sure if Yoast SEO adds Video Open Graph tags when you insert a video in one of your posts. You’d have to ask the plugin authors about this.

However, the errors above would not be displayed if Yoast SEO were outputting Open Graph Meta Tags. I can’t say fure sure without looking at your site, but it looks like neither Jetpack, nor Yoast SEO are adding Open Graph Meta tags to your site right now.

Does Publicize offer to not bypass its Open Graph functionality? So other plugins offering Open Graph functionality are being stopped?

Jetpack does the opposite; by default, Jetpack will add Open Graph functionality to your site. However, if another Open Graph plugin is active on your site, Jetpack will stopp adding its tags, and let the other plugin do the work.

Since no tags appear to be added to your site at the moment, it could be because you’re using another plugin that manages Open Graph meta tags, but you haven’t configured that plugin yet, so no tags are displayed by that plugin.

If you let me know your site URL, I’ll be happy to take a look.
If you want it to remain private, you can also contact us via this contact form:
https://jetpack.com/contact-support/

Thank you, Jeremy. I just send you a message through that form.

Is there a way to disable this functionality?

Sometimes I just post a video on my sites and I still want users to visit my site rather than view the video on facebook or twitter. I feel like I am losing viewership because of this.

What are my options?

Thanks to anyone who can provide an answer.

If you use Jetpack to manage Open Graph Meta Tags on your site, you can force Jetpack to not add any Video related tags by changing the post’s type from video to standard.

This post explains how to do the opposite, so you’ll only want to change $data['type'] = 'video'; to $data['type'] = 'standard';.