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[wd_hustle id="blog-posts" type="social_sharing"]If your website is on WordPress and you are using Yoast SEO, this post will help you update the social media image that displays when you share your post on Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn.
If you don’t set a social media image the platform will try to select an image from the page when you share a post. This doesn’t always look great, especially if the image is not super relevant or not the right size for your social media post.
STEP 1: Prep the image you want to display when your post is shared. Facebook recommends 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 if you want a larger, eye catching horizontal image rather than a small thumbnail. For a small thumbnail, the absolute minimum image size is 200×200 pixels. The image file size should be less than 5MB (Twitter’s more restrictive maximum size). Keep in mind that some of your image may be cropped on Twitter or LinkedIn as opposed to Facebook so no important text should be near the outer edges of your image. The minimum size for the Twitter image is 440 x 220 pixels so you are covered if you are using the larger image sizes recommended by Facebook.
Now that you have your image prepped you are ready to upload it to the post.
STEP 2: Edit your post and scroll down the Yoast SEO box.
STEP 3: Click the share icon to open the Facebook tab. Fill in the Facebook Title, Facebook Description fields and upload the image you want to show when you share your post.
The way this tab is labeled is confusing. It’s labeled ‘Facebook’ but this information will also be used on Twitter and LinkedIn. The reason is that all three of these sites use the Open Graph protocol. The Open Graph protocol was first introduced by Facebook to give website owners some control over what data is displayed when their content is shared. LinkedIn and Twitter will now also read this information when a post is shared on their network and use it to display relevant information about your post.
STEP 4: Clear the cache on Facebook using the Facebook Debugger
- To clear your post’s cache on Facebook, visit the Facebook Debugger here: https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/
- Paste the URL of the post you are working on in the Sharing Debugger tab and click ‘Debug’.
- You’ll see an outdated version of your page if Facebook has visited the page before.
- Click the Scrape Again button to fetch the updated social media information you’ve added to your WordPress post.
STEP 5: Clear the cache on Twitter using the Twitter Card Validator Tool
- To clear your post’s cache on Twitter, visit the Twitter Card Validator here: https://cards-dev.twitter.com/validator
- Paste your post’s URL into the Card URL box and click Preview Card. This automatically clears the cache on Twitter.
STEP 6: Clear the cache on LinkedIn using Clear the cache on Twitter using LinkedIn Post Inspector
- To clear your posts’ cache on LinkedIn, visit the LinkedIn Post Inspector here: https://www.linkedin.com/post-inspector/inspect/
- Enter your url and click on Inspect, You will see the updated preview image.
Note: You can do this on your pages, not just posts.
STEP 7: Update the backup image for any page shared on your site (when you haven’t specified specific information as described above).
- Visit the SEO tab in your Dashboard
- Click on Social
- Click on the Facebook tab and upload an image under Default settings.
- Any image you upload at the Page or Post level will override this default image.