Facebook Thumbnail Image

Here comes a question from my Facebook fans regarding Facebook thumbnail image:

How can I share my blog post with the right thumbnail on Facebook? Sometimes it shows the wrong thumbnail and worst of all doesn’t show any thumbnail.

Facebook Thumbnail Image Explanation

First we need to find out what causes the issue. The Facebook script tries to parse your web page and look for the right image for the thumbnail. But most of the time it fails to give the right image and worst of all returns no image at all. Since there are millions of themes, layouts and different HTML code from one website to another, Facebook recommends another way to fix this issue. The answer is using the open graph meta tag.

Facebook Thumbnail Image Solution

I developed a simple plugin for WordPress to automatically add the Facebook open graph meta tag. You can read my previous post “Facebook Open Graph Meta For WordPress” for more details. But for other CMSes such as Joomla, Blogspot, or others you can implement it in your themes. All you need is to define this meta tag before the closing header tag:

og:title //For the post title
og:type //For the post type,ex:movie,music,blog
og:url //Post Url
og:image //Post Thumbnail
og:site_name //Website Name
fb:admins //Your User ID
og:description //Post description

With those meta tags defined, Facebook will get the right information from your post and share it to people in your network. I hope this article answers the question. Thanks.