Does your website look bad when people share it on social media? In today’s tip, you’ll learn how to see what your website social media image looks like and how to fix it.
I was about to do a post yesterday on Facebook about High Hops Brewery. They have an awesome new beer release and I wanted to share it with my network. I wrote a post, put a link to their URL, and a preview of their website came up.
I immediately noticed that the image doesn’t look great and the title doesn’t look good. The description is okay, but I don’t know that they necessarily want to highlight the fact that they’re not a doggie or child daycare. They probably want to highlight some other information about their business when it’s actually being shared on social media.
Preview Your Website Social Media Image
There’s a way that you can see exactly what your website will look like when it’s shared on social media.
On Facebook, there’s the Facebook Sharing Debugger. Go to the Facebook Sharing Debugger, put in the URL of your website and click the debug button. This will show you, in advance, exactly what your webpage will look like when someone shares it on Facebook. By the way, this applies for Instagram as well.
Twitter has a similar tool called the Twitter Card Validator. You can just go to the card validator, enter in your URL, and it will give you a preview of what your website will look like if it’s shared on Twitter.
You can even do this on LinkedIn with the LinkedIn Post Inspector. As with the other tools, just put in the URL, click inspect, and it will show you what your website will look like if someone shares it on LinkedIn.
How Your Social Media Image Should Look
Here at Local Marketing Institute, we put open graph tags on all of our webpages so that we can control what our social media image, page title, and page description look like when someone shares it.
Take the URL of this page and put it into the Facebook Sharing Debugger, Twitter Card Validator, and LinkedIn Post Inspector. You’ll notice that the image, page title and page description aren’t pulled randomly from our page. It’s pulling the image, title and description we specifically set.
How to Fix Your Social Media Image
You can actually control the social media image, page title and page description through the use of open graph tags on your webpage. This can be done whether you’re on WordPress, Wix, Weebly or Squarespace. It’s easier in some systems than others, but this is controllable.
If you’re on Wix, Weebly or Squarespace, get in touch with their tech support and ask how you can control the open graph tags on your website so that your website shows up great when someone shares it to one of these social media networks.
If you’re on WordPress, get in touch with your web developer and consider using the Yoast SEO plugin.
You can control the open graph tags on your website so that it shows up great when someone shares it to one of these social media networks.
