People have asked me about sharing WordPress Posts on Facebook quite a lot. It seems that it is the cause of some issues, so I wanted to record this video to show you how to make sure that your posts and pages on WordPress are sharing beautifully on Facebook.
So we want to make sure that the right image is sharing and the right text that you, so it’s looking exactly how you want on Facebook. So I just wanted to show you I’ve created this post, which is just a basic post with some random text, and I’ve added a featured image.
Now, often once you have your SEO plugin installed (Yoast SEO plugin is shown here). Generally what will happen is when you share to Facebook, it will use the featured image, or if there is no featured image it’ll use the largest image on your page, or the first image on your page, it depends.
What we want to do is make sure that we provide Facebook an image to use, in case you want to use a different image, an image that’s not actually in your post.
So I’ll just show you how it shares sometimes. This is what what’s happened here. It’s not showing how I want it to, you can see that it doesn’t have any image here, and we can change this text as well.
So what we want to do is we’ll just copy that, that URL, which has also the same URL that is here, that’s the URL of the post. And we’ll come to the Facebook debug tool, which is where you can go to make sure that everything is looking right.
So as you can see, I’ve already got this in here. So I’ll just show you what, what I do just copy. So we just paste the URL that we have copied over. So paste that URL and press debug. And that will make just at that URL into Facebook.
And you will see that it is sharing this way, which is the preview of what we had here. So that’s how it’s sharing at the moment.
So I’ve updated the featured image, and pressed update in the post, just to make sure that the featured image is in the post.
Now what we want to do is we want to go back to the debug tool and we want to scrape again, because you can see here that it’s scraped about an hour ago, which was when it was looking like this. So if we scrape again and sometimes does take a little while, you might have to scrape again, and now we have a beautiful looking image.
We could change the text if we want to, this is the default way that the WordPress plugin will share to Facebook. It uses the featured image.
So now what we want to do is I want to show you how to add an image that you really want to see in this post.
You might want to have a call to action on the image, or you might want to have the post title in the image. You just might want it to be especially sized for Facebook. I’ll show you how you can do that.
So we come back to our post and we come down here to where the Yoast SEO settings are.
And this is the little social tab here. So if we click this, you can see that there’s a Facebook and a Twitter and they both work the same way. I’m just going to show you Facebook for today.
So in the title, we can just add any title you like. And then in the description, Any description you like.
You might like to make it a bit more appealing for people to click on. So a bit more like a Facebook ad, if you like, and then you can upload an image.
For this example, I’m just going to choose an image that is quite different to the one that we were using before. So we’ll definitely know when it’s updated. So we’ve changed all this, we’ve changed the title, the description and the image, and then we’ll click update, so all the data will be updated in the post.
And so now it is showing that featured image because we need to refresh the debug tool. So that’s how it was sharing before. So we just click scrape again, sometimes you do need to try it a couple of times.
So now we’ve got the new image and I’ll go back to here to share it again. And you’ll find that it now shares the correct image.
You can do anything that you like with the image and you can change the title and description so that it’s more appealing to be shared.
And that’s how to share wordpress posts on Facebook and make sure your posts and pages are sharing beautifully. Thank you. See you next time.