Now and again when sharing your posts on Facebook or Twitter the share can look a little off. Here are a few steps to optimize your site to be social media friendly.
How to optimize your site for social media
First install and activate the Yoast SEO plugin.
Once active you’ll find a new SEO > Social panel. From there you can enable and configure all of the OpenGraph and various meta tags that helps to provide social media platforms with the information that they need.
Essentially, instead of allowing Facebook to guess at what you want them to share, you’re explicitly telling them what to share.
For more on Yoast SEO’s social panel read Getting Open Graph for your Articles and Social Media Optimization with Yoast SEO.
How to troubleshoot your site for social media
Sometimes, despite our best efforts, Facebook will display our posts in an unexpected way or maybe even not at all.
If Facebook is unable to display your page or post first ensure that it has been Published. Sign out of WordPress or open an Incognito Window in Google Chrome and see if you can view the post. If you can’t see it then neither will Facebook or Twitter. Sign back in and Publish the post and things will begin working as expected.
Maybe you recently updated the title or image on a post, but Facebook isn’t showing your change. First ensure that you’ve cleared your site cache. We recommend WP Super Cache.
Next, you’ll want to manually notify Facebook of the change. Thankfully they have a Facebook Debugger for just this instance. Simply go here, enter your post URL, and click Fetch New Scrape Information. This will cause Facebook to reload your post and will also provide you with some further troubleshooting details should there be any other issues with your site configuration.
Optimizing your site for social media and troubleshooting errors is as simple as that.