Are you having trouble adding your featured image from your WordPress website into your social networks like Facebook and looking for a way to overwrite images on social media? Kori Ashton shows you this cool work around with the Yoast Plugin.
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Full Transcript
Hey you guys, if you are using WordPress and you’re trying to advertise your posts or your pages on social media, and maybe that featured image isn’t coming over correctly. I’ve got a really cool way that’s a workaround using a free plugin that you probably already have active or should have active on your WordPress website, let’s take a look at it right now.
Hey you guys, I’m Kori Ashton. Thanks for tuning in today. Every single Wednesday I’m creating a video just like this to help you improve your online marketing so be sure to subscribe. And Pressable’s one of our sponsors that makes this video happen. So if you’re looking for a great hosting company that can help you with your WordPress support, as well as hosting, be sure to reach out to them and let them know that Kori Ashton sent you their way. I’ll put the link to them in the thread below so you can check them out.
Okay, so you’re probably already using Yoast on can your website for SEO, if you’re not, I highly recommend it, and I’ll put links to that in the description below as well. So you can go check out that plugin. It’s a great plugin, a great resource to help you with search engine optimization, but it also has this really cool little back door area that I wanna show you right now. Let’s take a look. So Yoast is what I’m talking about. So it’s like toast but with a Y. Yoast, the free plugin that I want you to have installed and when you do have that installed you can come into your dashboard, you’ll have a section, it’ll be here on the left side that is for SEO, that is for the Yoast plugin.
Inside of here, there’s a little area called Social. So I’m gonna click on that and just show you something for a second, okay, let me show you an example of exactly what I’ve been trying to do to be sure that this is what you are trying to accomplish. So I’ve got this blog article in the front side of my website, and it has some pictures in it, I also have a featured picture, featured image assigned to it.
So let’s say I take this URL right here and I go over to my Facebook page, or any social media for that matter, right. And I come in here and I click the link, I drop in the link, right, and I wanna add something, it’s gonna build out that preview for me, so if my theme was built correctly, I want you to wrap your head around this, if your theme was built correctly with open graph, it should have gone over and be able to find an image inside of that blog article and rendered that image here beautifully. If it is not doing that correctly, you might have something disabled inside your website, or perhaps your theme author just wasn’t generous enough to do this for you. Well again, there’s a workaround to it.
So if it’s not pulling the correct image or if it’s not pulling it correct or it’s distorting it, you can go into this social area, and you can come in here and actually set in a default picture for Facebook, I actually put this picture in here.
So if my blog article doesn’t have an image in it or if I didn’t set a featured image in it, this picture would actually render so it’s still advertising my brand, right, it’s kind of a default or generic option inside of there. But you can do that for Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Google Plus.
Now these four Twitter, Pinterest, and Google Plus, are allowing you to use different types of settings specific to those social networks for their metatags, it’s super cool. But Facebook specifically I’m able to come in here and upload an image that I would want to use for default. But here’s the thing, if this is clicked to disabled, it won’t read it correctly. So be certain that these are all enabled across the board for all of these to be advanced and help you, and you wanna fill out these profiles as well to just allow Yoast to go ahead and connect your website easily and quickly inside of these social networks, kind of cool, huh?
So now every time you go over to make a post, it should pull the correct image inside of your article, and if you’ve forgotten one or if your article didn’t need one, it’ll pull that default image that you set there. Now that was kind of for the overall generic part of your website, right, but what if you wanted to override it page to page, post to post, specifically on your pages, you can do that as well. That’s what makes this so powerful.
So I’ll give you another quick example. Join Kori Live here, this is for my webinar page, and I do have a lot of little pictures that live on here, but I want a picture that’s gonna be really cool and can work really well on social media. So look at this example. This is that URL right here, but it’s pulling up a really weird picture inside of Twitter, as I was talking about getting ready to do another webinar with Rebecca Gill, well we weren’t talking about WordPress translation plugins, we were talking about SEO. So this picture is not relevant at all. So what you’ll wanna do is go into your media library, upload a picture that works best for you, I kind of just took a screenshot of the whole page. I’ve got that URL now, you’re gonna go back and edit the actual page.
This is my early bird page. Inside of each page is a Yoast area. You’re gonna click on this little social area and right here, here’s my tab for Facebook you have another tab for Twitter if you wanted. I’m gonna go to Facebook, paste it in there, there’s my picture. You can add in a custom Facebook description, a custom Facebook title, it even gets really cool if you wanna address your Facebook followers on here.
So really cool here, and of course, if you wanna add it in there for Twitter as well, you would do that so that the next time somebody tweets out this URL or posts this URL on Facebook, now the correct, correlating picture will show up and it won’t look weird as you’re advertising this on all social media.
I hope this helps you, hang on one second though before you go, I just wanna let you know this isn’t instant, so if you go plug this in right now and click and then you run back over and check, it might take a little while, caching on your website might take a little bit. So I would say enable everything, and maybe give it a day or two to test it and see if it works correctly.
Pretty cool huh you guys. I use it all the time on all of our websites here at WebTegrity, and we also use it on askKori.com, it’s a great resource, and if you’d like to learn more about Yoast, I have an entire playlist for that plugin that helps you understand keywords, the readability tab, all sorts of cool features inside of that Yoast plugin. I’ve got a whole playlist, I’ll put the link to that in the description below.
Be sure to subscribe because every week I’m creating content just like this to help you improve your online marketing. I’ll see you next time, bye everyone.
