What it is
og:description is a meta tag, <meta property="og:description" content="...">, that controls the short summary text shown underneath the headline when your page's link is shared on platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, or in a messaging app preview. It's the Open Graph equivalent of your regular SEO meta description, but it's a separate, independently controlled setting.
Most platforms will fall back to your regular meta description if this specific tag isn't set — which often works fine, but keeping them separate lets you write differently for a search engine result versus a shared social post, where the tone and context can reasonably differ.
Why it matters
The description shown in a shared preview is part of what convinces someone to click through, alongside the headline and image — a vague or missing description (or one awkwardly pulled from elsewhere on the page as a fallback) makes that shared link less compelling than it could be, right at the moment it's being put in front of a new audience by someone else's share.
This matters most for content that gets shared socially by nature — blog posts, announcements, product launches — where the preview card is doing real persuasive work with an audience that hasn't seen your site before.
How to fix it
- Write one or two sentences summarizing the page in a way that reads well in a social feed — slightly more conversational than a search-engine meta description is a reasonable approach.
- Add
<meta property="og:description" content="Your summary here">inside the page's<head>section. - If you're using a website builder or an SEO plugin, look for a dedicated "Social Share Description" field rather than editing code directly.
- Keep it reasonably short — most platforms truncate long descriptions, so lead with the most important part of the sentence.
- Test with Facebook's Sharing Debugger or LinkedIn's Post Inspector to confirm the description appears as expected.