How to Control the Facebook Thumbnail in WordPress | EP 627

 How to Control the Facebook Thumbnail in WordPress

1. YOAST Plugin 01:00
2. All-in-one SEO Plugin  02:33

Read the full episode transcript below:

00:25 David Blackmon: Everybody welcome to another episode of WP The Podcast brought to you by WP Gears I’m David Blackmon.

00:35 Tim Strifler: And I’m Tim Strifler.

00:37 David Blackmon: Today in episode 627 we’re gonna talk about how to control the Facebook thumbnail in WordPress. You may notice that sometimes when you share your content from your website to social media platforms such as Facebook it’s not showing the image that you  really want to display.  And we’re gonna tell you how to fix that really easily and quickly.

01:00 Tim Strifler: Yeah and so by default WordPress will typically use like or yeah Facebook will use your WordPress featured post or 
featured image of the post that you’re sharing or the page or whatever. But a lot of times you might not have a featured image. Like if it’s a page or you know something like that and so then what it’ll try to do is use the first image of the page. However if you’re using a page builder it sometimes has a hard time like grabbing it so instead it might grab like your your favicon and so  you’ll have a thumbnail in Facebook and it will basically have your favicon all stretched out and just looks horrible. And so you want to be able to control that. And sometimes like for me I run Facebook ads and Facebook has some strict rules on how much text they allow in the image, and so what I’ll do is I’ll have a normal featured image that might have the text over the amount that Facebook can use and that’s just the image that shows up on my site but then I might have a different image that shows up on the Facebook thumbnail. That’s reducing the amount of text that way Facebook doesn’t penalize me when I
start running an ad for that post and so having that fine-tuned control is really really useful. And so the first way to do that this is what David and I
both use is Yoast. We use the Yoast plug-in for SEO and being able to control the title tags and meta descriptions and the sitemap and stuff
like that. We’ll Yoast has some other kind of additional features built in such as being able to control the Facebook thumbnail for each individual
WordPress page post custom post type etc so that’s that’s what we highly recommend. 

02:33 David Blackmon: The second one is another tool All-in-one SEO which is very similar to. Yes they are both plug-ins for WordPress that allow you to control a lot of what Tim was talking about, title ,meta tag, you can in that social settings on both of those plugins you’re gonna be able to set which image. And I highly recommend that you do this just getting habit of doing it one thing that you’re gonna want to make sure that you do. However if for example Facebook grabs the favicon image that Tim talked about,  you’re gonna need to go and use the Facebook  debugger to reset that image. So if you just Google Facebook debugger we’ll put a link in the actual episode of the blog posts on WP Gears, calm, but you just need to go in quickly debug that it’ll grab the new image that you’ve set in Yoast, or All-in-one SEO and then boom you’re done! That’s how you control the Facebook thumbnail and WordPress and it’s super easy. It’s like really quick, but if you get in the habit of doing it it’s gonna benefit you in the long run and stuff. 

03:39 Tim Strifler: Yeah absolutely, nothing more to say. There might be standalone plugins that allow you to do that but we recommend
just using an SEO plugin for all the additional benefits as well.

03:49 David Blackmon: So tomorrow we’ve got another great episode, can access the WordPress admin here’s what you do Tim until tomorrow we’ll see you then.

03:58 Tim Strifler: Take care, bye bye.