When you — or someone that reads your content — share a link to your site on social media, your Featured Image is the default image pulled as the preview. For some, that’s perfect. However, there are times that you’d want a different layout or graphic for social media compared to the image displays directly on your site. And in that case, you can use a free plugin to create a unique image for Facebook.
Save your custom Facebook image
The hardest part about this entire process is going to be creating the graphic. Consider what grabs your attention as you scroll social media. Paired with the problem your content helps solve, you can create a branded graphic with dimensions for social vs for your own blog page.
It used to be that you wanted a graphic with set dimensions in a specific orientation. Thankfully Facebook (or are we calling it Meta yet?) has code in place that will display tall images next to the preview text + wide images above the preview text.
Once you’ve created your post or page graphic, you’ll add the unique image for Facebook directly to that post editor. This is all assuming you already have Yoast SEO installed on your site. If not, start there.
- Scroll to the bottom of your page or post to the Yoast SEO heading
- Click the Social tab
- Select / upload the image you want to use (you can do this for both Facebook + Twitter)
- Save your changes to the page
Now when the post or page link is shared on social media, your unique graphic will show along with the page title + preview text. You might have noticed you can edit these in the Social tab of Yoast SEO as well!
Set a default Facebook image for your entire WordPress site
If you don’t use Featured Images on your WordPress site, I’d recommend setting up a default Facebook image with the Yoast SEO plugin. That way your content always has an image with it on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, etc.
Create a graphic that is branded for your website, your podcast, or your most popular service. You could also include your tagline in the graphic. That will nudge folks to click on the shared link when they see it. To add this default image to your site…
- Go to SEO > Social in the lefthand menu of WordPress
- Click on the Facebook tab at the top of the page
- Select your image (either by uploading it or picking it from the media library)
- Save your changes
And that’s how to create a unique image for Facebook, no matter what link is shared from your site. This is helpful for those pages that get shared as resources but don’t have an assigned featured image.