Make Your Social Media Previews Shine
After building a site, doing the QA, fine tuning the carefully crafted content, it’s time to share it with the world. So you post it on Facebook and bam – the funky slider you had tried early on is showing up. Or the short blurb summary is something you wrote on the last site. It’s just not what you want to show off at all. What is going on?
This is the social media preview and it’s controlled by the meta data of your page. There are ways to fix it. Yoast SEO plugin has a feature called Social that allows you to set the image and blurb content for each page individually for both Facebook and X, but won’t show you the result unless you have the pro version.
But did you know you can check out those previews yourself with the debugger pages provided by each platform?
- Facebook Sharing Debugger
- Linkedin Post Inspector
- Pinterest Rich Pins
- Twitter (X) has moved it’s preview function to the Tweet Composer.
One of the last things I do before announcing a site launch is to do a private post test on Facebook and then check the page on the Facebook Sharing Debugger to update the cached version of the site. Sometimes it takes a few refreshes to get the current version to show up. Here are a few tips.
- Choose the image you want to appear on social media in the Yoast tool on the Social tab under Social Media Appearance.
- Fine tune the site summary in Yoast.
- Be sure your home page title does NOT say “Home.” The title should include keywords to describe or name your site.
- After saving the page updates, go to the Facebook Sharing Debugger and see how it looks. If the latest changes are not appearing, refresh the view until you see it again.
