An Easy Fix for WordPress-to-Facebook Share Shame

Have you ever experienced Facebook Share Shame?

Maybe you tried to share a page or post from your WordPress website on Facebook and the image, title and/or description was just wrong….weird…or non-existant.

There is an easy fix for that.

First, make sure that you have the Yoast SEO plugin installed and activated. (I install this free plugin into every WordPress site I build and manage.)

There are three basic pieces of information that you should fill in to the Yoast box (it will appear below your text editor) for every page or post you create:

1. Focus keyword: This does not show up in your social media share, but it does contribute to your SEO for that page or post.

2. Description: Change this by clicking “Edit snippet.” Your description does not directly affect SEO, but the more relevant and enticing it is when people see it in your Facebook share, the more clicks it will get.

3. Title: By default, the title of your page will show up on your share, but clicking on the title in the Yoast box will give you an opportunity to change the SEO Title, which will be what shows up in the share. For example, the title of this page on my client Elicia Miller’s website is “Couples,” but the SEO title gives more detail, and shows up in Facebook shares (as well as the browser tab) as “Conscious Relating Couples Sessions, Workshops and Retreats.”

Your next step is to choose a featured image. (In any WordPress page or post, you will find this upload box on the bottom of the right sidebar when you are editing.) Some themes will place your featured image at the top of a page or post by default, so if you don’t want this, look for a setting you can change to make your featured image not show up in those places.

Save/update your page or post and now you’re done, right?

You go to share on Facebook, and to your dismay, the old information still shows up.

Why???

Well, this is the key: Facebook is showing a cached view of the old information, so now you need to tell it to “scrape” your page or post again.

To do this, go to https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug. (You may also need to be logged in to Facebook to see this page.)

It will look like this:

Now, enter the exact URL of the page or post you want to share in the box at the top.

Click “Debug.”

Now scroll down and look at the info that comes up for that page or post.

If it shows the old info, click “Scrape again.” Repeat until you see the new information represented.

Now, Facebook has the current information. When you share your page or post, this information will appear in your share.

Never be ashamed to share again. 🙂

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