Sometimes when we share blog posts on Facebook or other social media
platforms, the wrong image appears.
Now you might've noticed this when sharing other people's content, but what
happens when you share your own website content and a completely different image
appears in the Facebook post preview.
this is a common problem, but it's easily fixed.
So let's take a look at how we can tell Facebook which image it should share.
So here's a test blog post that I've created without any images whatsoever.
there are no featured images or images within the text.
I want to show you what happens when we share a blog post on Facebook
and the wrong image appears, and then what we can do about it.
Okay, so there we go.
It's a test posts with just some lorem ipsum.
No actual images, but you can see there's an image in the sidebar here.
So that's the only image that appears on the page.
if we go to the Facebook for developers sharing debugger, which I'll leave
a link to in the description and we put the URL of the website in there.
Click debug.
So, what that does is Facebook will go and pull the Open Graph
images from the blood post.
So this Facebook debugger is a tool that tests what's called the Open Graph
data in a blog post, or a website.
IRL URL.
This open graph data is the information that Facebook uses to
build the title the description.
And the image, among other things.
When an Earl does not have an image specified in the open graph
data, facebook will try to pull an image from somewhere else.
And this may be the logo of the website or another image on the page.
or even an image from some other part of the website.
this is not ideal.
And we don't want just random images to be shared for a particular post.
Like this one, which is pulled directly from the sidebar.
So, what can we do?
Well, we need to tell Facebook and the other social media platforms that we
want a particular image to be shared.
We can also specify a different title or description.
This is useful for creating a more, say click-bait title or compelling
description for social media.
In this way, we're not changing the SEO titles and negatively impacting
the blog post in Google search.
So, where can you select the images for the open graph tags?
Well, you can do this on WordPress with SEO plugins like Yoast or the one
I prefer, which is called SEO Press.
Of course you can edit the HTML code, but for most WordPress
users, that's not really an option.
It's much easier to use an SEO plugin to take care of the hard work.
So here, I'm looking at the SEO Press plugin dashboard, in the
WordPress dashboard and under social networks, you can see here that you
can enable the open graph data and you can also set a default thumbnail.
So any time Facebook cannot find an image
For sharing.
It will take this default.
So that should be a general image that you use across your
website, or it could be a logo.
And you can also specify other bits and pieces here like descriptions of products
You can do the same for Twitter and you can also add in your social accounts.
But for now, we're just going to focus on one thing.
And that's the image for this particular test page blog post.
scroll down you should see this section at the bottom.
It's the same with Yoast.
And it's the same with SEO press - my favorite SEO plugin.
Both tools use a very similar method add in the Open Graph data.
You can see here under the title settings, you can see exactly what it will look
like in the search engine results.
So on Google, you can see a mobile and a desktop preview.
And under social, we can specify the Facebook title, the Facebook
description and the Facebook thumbnail.
If you have a featured image specified, that will generally be the
image that Facebook takes to share.
But you can have a featured image and you can have a different Facebook thumbnail.
And you can also do the same for Twitter.
Select an image here and I just upload a file.
I've created an image.
especially for Facebook, which is 1,200 by 630 pixels.
those are the dimensions that are ideal for a Facebook link post.
So if I save this.
And then retry the URL in the Facebook debugger.
Let's see what happens.
this time we should see the new image.
Okay.
I put these arrows in here to see if Facebook was going
to chop off any of the edges.
But no.
1200 by 630 px is generally the the best image size to use.
And that's it Anytime you're not using a featured image or you want
a particular image to appear in Facebook, you can specify it here.
Remember that the featured image wil be taken by default.
You can also specify fallback or a default image in the Facebook open
graph section of SEO press Leave a comment below if there's something
you'd like me to explain further.
Thanks for watching.