Prep your WordPress images for Facebook

With almost 2 billion active users, it’s hard to ignore Facebook as a platform for your business. Odds are that someone who needs your product or service has a tab open for Facebook right now. But how do you grab their attention on a platform loaded with status updates, videos + other notifications? Start with content that is easily sharable on social media + already optimized for Facebook specifically.

Easily sharable content

Publishing a post without any images or video will make it difficult to grab anyone’s attention on Facebook.

If someone pastes a link to your content on their own FB page or profile, but there are no graphics accompanying it, their friends + followers will only see text. But if you have images in your post — or a default Facebook image set with an SEO plugin — that content will appear with the page description.

What’s more likely to grab your attention as you scroll down your newsfeed, a bunch of text or an image?

Optimized content

Now that you see why having images on your pages + posts is better for business, you can set up your images to be exactly what Facebook wants.

The current image size that FB recommends for their platform is 476px wide by 249px tall. Yes, it’s random, but if you want your images to look good when they are shared, you’ll want to create them to these dimensions. (Or 952px by 498px for a higher resolution.)

Creating an image with those dimensions + using it as the featured image will ensure that the graphic you created specifically for FB is the first option that shows up when the link is shared.

If you don’t use these dimensions, Facebook will crop whatever image you did add to fit the size they want. So if your image has text or faces, you’ll run the risk of the important elements not being shown.

Are you updating popular content that had different images or none at all?

Then you’ll want to let Facebook know to revisit the page to see your new graphics. The best way to do that is to go to their debugger URL + paste in your blog post link. Click “debug” + once the page loads, click “scrape again” to grab the new content.

If you use Pinterest for your business as well as Facebook, learn how to prep your images for that platform with this post.

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