Have you ever shared a link on social media and experienced a weird preview with description and a photo that has nothing to do with the content of the page that you are trying to share on Facebook, Twitter or any other social media platform?
Same is experienced by the content viewers, they see an un-crafted Title, Description and Photo that don’t appeal to them to click or share but ignore or even trash.
This post is all about how to get the right image and text preview for the pages and posts that you want to share on social network platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
It can be very frustrating when you change a photo out or when you’re sharing your page or post or event and it doesn’t show the right information.
These platforms have developed some tools to help us with that but they’re not really readily known so I’m going to share those with you.
Table of Contents
Kontentino:
The first option is to use Kontentino blog. They have implemented a way allowing you to edit link headlines and descriptions. The only difference is, you are required to add a call to action button.
This is according to Facebook terms & conditions, actually, Facebook’s got it well documented within their developer’s section.
Facebook Debugging Tool
The second one is of course Facebook and their tool is called Debugging Tool. Facebook debugger tool can be found on Google and looks as below:
Just put the link in the debug field and click debug. You may use your new post or it can be an old page that has been around a long time and maybe you’ve updated it or you’ve updated the picture and you want Facebook to grab it.
It goes back and it scrapes the information on your page and fetches it because Facebook doesn’t know or any of these platforms don’t know that you’ve changed anything and so they’re going to keep the memory.
With every new link they take the latest preview that they’ve had and use it until you tell them otherwise. So that’s what this tool does.
After fetching the new information it shows the picture and the title. Sometimes it also shows the description. What’s important is that it’s got the correct image and the correct title. Now go share it on Facebook.
If it’s not showing up correctly click scrape again and wait a few seconds scrape again until you find the correct image and information.
LinkedIn Post Inspector
LinkedIn has a Post Inspector tool for their scraping or debugging. You can use this for a new link or an old one that you’ve just updated.
Make sure it’s going to look correct before you share it everywhere or ask people to share it right so that it looks good.
They don’t have any sort of scrape again tool so you have to keep hitting this if it’s not showing up correctly.
Twitter Card Validator
It’s called a Card Validator because that little preview they have with the picture and the title is they call them Twitter cards.
Put the link in the tab and preview card and you can also do this to any link.
It’s not just your own but any link before you share it. So this one pulls up description and title. Twitter card takes the title of your page. Yoast SEO loaded onto your WordPress might have changed the page title. Twitter will actually take your actual page title so it is good to test to see where it’s pulling the title from.
You can change actual page titles instead of using the Yoast plugin.