If you own a blog you must be aware of how important Facebook is. Visual content does very well on Facebook, so you have to optimize your posts to leverage that. You can get more engagement by putting nice looking graphical thumbnails to your posts. There are some limitations when it comes to customizing the posts for Facebook.
In this post, we will talk about the solutions of a problem regarding the thumbnails on Facebook posts.
When Facebook fails to load the featured image
When you post your blog links to your Facebook page, you might have noticed that it sometimes fails to load the image you want to display. It does loads the images on the page and gives you an option to select one image, but sometimes you want to use a custom image. Which can be uploaded from your PC. (as shown below)
There are also times when Facebook doesn’t load any page at all. It’s just link and meta description, it doesn’t even give the option to upload a custom image from your PC.
When Facebook fails to load any image.
What you can do in this situation is, reload the page, and paste the same link again, it works for me every time I am facing this issue. I have also noticed that it happens when the connection is inconsistent, as the Facebook script is not able to load the images and is timed out.
When Facebook fails to load both links and images.
If the above method doesn’t work for you, you can upload the image and put the description of your post in the caption field and put the link to your post. It is still better than posting a link without a thumbnail because Facebook is a platform which gives more weightage to the visual content.
Facebook fails to load images when someone shares your post.
Even though you have options to select the featured thumbnail for your post, Facebook will still show the random image (or no image in some cases) when it is shared by someone else. In this case, we will have to make Facebook choose the image for the thumbnails.
There are two ways to do it,
(a) Put codes manually where to make Facebook choose a default image for all the posts. Put the code in the header.php file of your WordPress theme, more about this coding usage can be found on WPBeginner
<meta property="og:image" content="http://example.com/image.jpg"/>
If you are not comfortable with editing your blog theme with codes. you will find option (b) little easy.
(b) Use the Easy Social Share Buttons Plugin to share the custom image. ESSB is a beautiful Sharing buttons plugins that also happens to have this features of putting custom message, url and image for shares, and it works for Pinterest as well.
So, this is it, do you face any specific problem regarding thumbnails of Facebook? please share the issues as well as solutions in the comments below.
