Are you happy with the choices Facebook offers as the image thumbnail to represent “likes” of – or links to – your Website or blog?
If you are unsure what I am talking about, look at the image below. When you post a link on your Facebook news feed or share a site by “liking” it, you are given several thumbnail images to choose from to represent the link as depicted. In this example, there are seven choices.
The problem is that Facebook will often grab images that are unrelated to the linked page. For example, images from sidebars or ads may appear instead of relevant images. To discover which image Facebook sees as most relevant for any page of your Website, use the Facebook URL Linter Tool.
Luckily, you do have control over which image is used as the thumbnail when you and others share content from your Website on Facebook. There are a few options available.
First, you can place a line of code in the header of your Website that will force Facebook to use the same image for all of the pages on your site. Here is the line of code I use to ensure that my logo is used as the thumbnail image when a page from Social Media Power is “liked” or shared on Facebook:
Place this line of code (once it is replaced with your own image link) in the HEAD section of the home page of your Website. If you are using WordPress to power your site, you can place this code in your header.php file. The result will be only one choice of image, as shown here:
If you want more control over which image Facebook uses for each page of your site as opposed to the same image for every page, you can use Facebook’s open graph meta tags. You also want to use this method for individual products or listings.
Finally, if your site is powered by WordPress there is an easier way to control your Facebook thumbnails. The Facebook Like Thumbnail plugin is a nice way to gain control over which images Facebook uses to represent any page or post on your site.
(Thanks go out to Stephanie Barko for suggesting this topic as a Social Media Tip of the Day. Do you have a topic to suggest?)
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About the Author:
Deltina Hay is the author of the critically acclaimed book, The Social Media Survival Guide, already in its second edition. She also teaches the online version of Drury University’s Social Media Certificate program. Learn more about Deltina and her availability for speaking engagements at Deltina.com. You may also enjoy listening to her video tutorial series on YouTube.
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Author: Deltina Hay
Social Media Power founder, Deltina Hay, is the author of The Bootstrapper’s Guide to the Mobile Web and The Social Media Survival Guide. Deltina developed the graduate, Social Media Certificate program for Drury University, and offers quality online courses at DeltinaU.com.
No doubt your post worth reading. Being a Social media marketer i was looking for this info regarding controlling thumbnails on facebook. I am running four page on face book, two are of football related, on hosting related and another one cricket related. I use to post a lots of updates on all of those pages, am quite surprised after using twitter that its much easier to get followers on twitter as compare to FB as its quite a hard job to get likes or fans on your page with out any investment. Any ways nice share.
This was great. Thank you so very much for posting this tidbit.
Glad it helped, Pat!
Thanks, I've been wondering how to do this. Never heard of the URL linter tool before.
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Glad it helped, Alec!
Any way to do this without having access to the header or global template for a CMS content page? My company uses a CMS and I can't modify/add <html> or <head> tags on any pages … only modify the content within the <body> tag. I can't add a 2nd <html> or <head> tag within the body because the CMS strips it on publish. Thus, I can't really use the Open Graph tags or the <link img-src= …> method….
any help would be greatly appreciated!
Heath,Depending on your CMS, there may be a plugin you can use. Is it an open source CMS like WordPress, Joomla!, or Drupal?Deltina
Hi Heath,
if you're using WordPress as your CMS, i wrote a very useful article on how to ensure your post thumbnail in social media sites including facebook of course. http://wpleet.com/ensure-your-post-thumbnail-in-s…
Unfortunately, I work for a company that uses a third party to help manage the design of our site, so the templates and anything meaningful is controlled by someone else (read: i don't get access to anything outside of the <body> tag essentially… the CMS is called OpenCMS – very pared down compared to something like Joomla or WordPress unfortunately (both of which i'm familiar with)…
Heath,OpenCMS has been around for a while. I would be surprised if they did not have some way to do this. But then if you don't have access that is another story. Hope you get more control soon!
Using a blog with the right tools is almost always the best way to keep content fresh on your website
Hey there
This is a great post, very .
Thanks!
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Thank you for a awesome blog post.
Good post friend , worth my time
I love finding new useful WordPress plugins. This is a great one. Thanks!
What about a joomla website?
Open graph should work on Joomla! sites as well. Just put the markup in your head…