I recently published one of my songs to Facebook, to share with my friends. Facebook doesn't allow publishing audio files, only photos or videos, so I usually just post a link to my Bandcamp page[archived] or my blog. I noticed that the engagement with the song is very limited, even though I have a good number of friends (I am an exception to the friendship paradox[archived], since I have more friends than my friends on average).

To test a way of getting more engagement, I downloaded a simple video from archive.org of slightly longer length than one of my songs, using ffmpeg to replace the original audio, and later trimming the video to the song length using QuickTime Player. After posting that video to Facebook, I noticed that I was able to reach many more people this way, getting comments and reactions from unexpected friends who I haven't talked to in a long time.

I decided to do the same for the links I automatically post to Twitter. After some research I discovered that Twitter supports cards with embedded content[archived]. All I had to do was add custom metadata to my posts, and create a custom HTML page to be embedded. This was easy to do on my blog engine[archived], since it supports plugins that run after a post has been built.

So let's test this out! Here's a song I wrote earlier this year, called Another lovely night[archived]: