Facebook 101: How To Get The Best Thumbnail Image To Show On Facebook Links Every Time

[Updated: 2nd September 2016]

What happens when you post a link to Facebook? Are there times when it chooses the wrong thumbnail image to share with your post or worse, no image at all? It happens to us all from time to time.

Today I’m going to show you three fixes.

1. Forces Facebook to crawl your site and find images
2. Will tell Facebook the specific image you want it to use when a link is shared
3. Is how you can manually select or upload an image to share with your link

1. Facebook debug

If you are getting no image at all it’s possibly due to a crawl error. The Facebook debug tool will ask Facebook to crawl your page and find all info.

You just need to visit the debug web page, add your link and hit the debug button.

You’ll get a whole list of errors, you can ignore these for now but scroll down and check it’s picked up your images.

That’s it, once Facebook has crawled your site and found images it will be able to find them when you post your link.

2. Tell Facebook what image you want to share

If you are a WordPress user you are in luck. The Yoast plugin allows you to specify which image you want to display with your link when shared on Facebook.

Once you have finished composing a post or page on your site, scroll down to the Yoast box.

Click on the sharing icon and select the Facebook tab.

Upload your image or choose an existing image from our site to accompany your link when shared on Facebook.

If you don’t use WordPress you can add code manually. Copy the code below, add the link to your image and paste it into the head section of your webpage.

3. When posting to Facebook

When you add your link to a Facebook post it should pull in any images it finds on the page you are linking to. If you haven’t specified a single image it will create a carousel from these.

I had noticed that links that are posted this way organically get fewer click throughs and I think I know why. I discovered that when you click an image on a carousel link, instead of it bringing you to the website it just scrolls on to the next image.

When you post a link to a Facebook business page you have the option of selecting the image you want to accompany your post. Underneath the preview you’ll see all the available images. Get rid of any you don’t need by deselecting them. If you want to use a different image you can upload one by clicking the ‘+’.

This workaround is a good fix when you are posting the link to your page but it doesn’t give you any control over what is shown when others link to your page. Wherever possible I recommend using method 2 to specify the image you want to share.