Facebook Open Graph date format

Question

When generating a meta tag for article:published_time or og:updated_time, in what format should I put the time. Some documentation in Facebook says it should be in Unix epoch and other documentation suggest is should be in ISO 8601.

<meta property="og:updated_time" content="1414056907" /> or

<meta property="og:updated_time" content="2013-01-22T09:10:08+0100" />

Thank you for looking in to this.

Sander

Answer 1

I recommend using the ISO 8601 date format as specified in OpenGraph official documentation (see here : http://ogp.me/#data_types).

I tested it successfully with the facebook sharer function to force the crawler to get a new image.

Answer 2

While I agree with the logic of the last answer, when using the tool at https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/og/object/ we see that a meta tag reading

<meta property="og:updated_time" content="2015-04-07T13:19:06-04:00" />

is converted to 1428432011 when FaceBook reads it.

That is not to say, use the integer value. However, if Facebook is the reason you are wondering, it seems not to matter.