Social media is a big part of our lives and I’ll bet that when you’ve spent ages putting your fingers to the keyboard to create the most amazing post you’ll want to share it with like the whole world but how many times have you hopped on over to your Facebook page, pasted the link into a new post and some random image pops up or even worse absolutely nothing?!
This exact thing has been happening to me time and time and again and then just yesterday I wrote a fab post about Becoming Successful and fellow blogger and amazing Creative Consultant Nadia van der Mescht shared my post and this is what it looked like…
To say I was totally embarrassed was an understatement, totally all my fault not hers but it needed sorting out asap so I spent a good hour yesterday sorting it out and I’m pleased to say it’s all working perfectly – yay! So today I’m going to be sharing with you the importance of your images on Facebook, the best plugin to use for social media sharing and how to use Facebook’s Object debugger tool.
THE IMPORTANCE OF IMAGES ON FACEBOOK?
Images play a huge roll in creating engagement on your social pages, studies show they help generate more likes, shares, and comments. The things we all want more of for both our blog and business, but when you’re sharing your links and either the wrong image is coming up, it’s being cut-off or nothing at all is appearing it can unfortunately damage the engagement of the post.
SO WHAT DOES FACEBOOK REQUIRE?
In the words of Facebook…
Use images that are at least 1200 x 630 pixels for the best display on high resolution devices. At the minimum, you should use images that are 600 x 315 pixels to display link page posts with larger images. If your image is smaller than 600 x 315 px, it will still display in the link page post, but the size will be much smaller
***Our first step then is to make sure all your images are at least 600 x 315 pixels ***
ENSURING YOUR SITE IS READY FOR SOCIAL MEDIA SHARING…
After some trial and error I finally settled on using the Yoast SEO Plugin, only the best plugin for SEO and Social Media Sharing. This plugin is absolutely free and is extremely easy to install on your site and if setup correctly can really boost your blog or business. For today I’m going to assume you’ve already installed the plugin and head straight to the Social Media Settings…
USING THE FACEBOOK DEBUGGER TOOL
The Facebook Debugger is a really handy tool to use to see what will be included when a post is shared on Facebook. Let’s take a look back at that rather embarrassing blog share from yesterday and see what happens when we run the URL through the Debugger Tool after the amendments we made in the video above…
Yay it worked!
NOTE: If you make any amendments to the caption or images be sure to run the URL through the Debugger tool first before posting on Facebook because all shared pages are cached by Facebook and if they aren’t refreshed then it will still be referencing the old information.
I hope you found this tutorial handy and manage to implement it on your website but feel free to let me know if you are having any issues or need me to clarify anything. I’d be more than happy to help you out!
This is awesome!! Thanks Nix
Thanks Veronica
You are a LEGEND! I was trying to figure Yoast out last night & couldn’t figure out what half the stuff was for. Thank you times a million
An absolute pleasure Mands! Let me know if you’d like me to do some more tutorials on the Yoast SEO plugin or SEO in general x
Hi Nicola,
This is great – so simple and easy to follow. I tried to set up the social settings and default images etc. However I don’t seem to have the option to add a Title and Description on the FB tab….do you know why?
Thanks,
Ashley
Hi Ash, did you manage to figure this one out? It may be that it is clashing with another plugin that you’ve got installed?