Facebook seems to have a problem recently with the algorithm to display your blog’s Featured Image.  I mean we go to a lot of trouble to write our blog posts and then we choose just the right image to represent our post.  When we tell people about our blog post on Facebook, the image chosen isn’t our featured image. Often the only images offered are from you sidebar opt-in forms.  This is a problem.   As I write this, the problem seems to have been resolved; however I still get questions about this regularly.  For example bloggers Publish a post and then when they go to post it on Facebook, they realize that they didn’t create a featured image or somehow Facebook selected the wrong image .   Here is a How-To on fixing this problem.

I’m going to out on a limb here and posting some information that I believe is correct, but I can’t prove it.   On the other hand it has worked for me the last 10 times I’ve used it and I hear other people facing the same problem.

Background About Facebook and Blog Post Images

Again I can’t swear to any of this, but it is fairly obvious to me that when you first post a link on Facebook it look through the page you post is on and picks what it thinks is the best image.  This takes it a little time.  It stores that image in a database.  After that when you post the same URL it goes to the database, finds the image and uses that.  You can remove the image they used from your blog post and Facebook will still use the image from its first pass.

How to Get Facebook to Change the Image Facebook Displays

If you Google for Facebook Debugger, you will find a page that asks you for a URL (something that starts with http://Facebook.com or http://www.facebook.com.   The page will display debugging information about your page.

I’ll be honest, half of what it says I don’t understand (and I’ve been doing this for a llooonngg time.)

I 0ften do see it telling me that it found an image and that image is too small.  They say that it is under 200 x 200 pixels.  Of course it isn’t too small and it has always been okay in the past, but what the heck.   In some cases they are just falt using the wrong image.  It might be our fault or it might be theirs.  Either way – let’s fix it.

Making Facebook Play Nice – Get it to Display Your Blog’s Featured Image

 

Here is what I do.

If I forgot the image, I just add it, make it the featured image and then use the Facebook Debugger to see if that fixes the problem.  If it doesn’t I go the next step.

1. Start to post a link on Facebook.
2. Look at the image options Facebook offers (if any)
3. If my Featured Image is NOT the correct image I create a copy of that image and make it 1000 x 1000 pixels.  (I call it <image name>-large.png
4. You can try resizing it to where both height and width are 1,000 pixels or greater.  I’ve just been using the 1000 x 1000 and it works.
5. Upload the large image
6. Make it the Featured Image.
7. Process my Blog’s URL through the Facebook Debugger
8. See if Facebook is playing nice now.  So far it always has.

Steps 1 and 2 – Start to Post a Link in Facebook and Look at the Image Options

Okay – this is not the image I want.  Maybe I forgot to set the featured Image or maybe Facebook went off and decided for themselves.

Let’s assume I did set the Featured Image.

Steps 3 and 4 – Create a Copy of the Image and Resize it to 1000 x 1000 pixels.

Let’s look at a simple way to do this.