Trouble with Facebook Link Photos Not Working

Facebook has made some significant API updates in the past few months in an effort to combat the spread of fake news and misrepresentation. We’re going to walk through a few of the common problems and what you can do to address some of the issues with Facebook links and photos.

Facebook Link Sharing Not Working

One of the biggest issues we’ve seen is some conflicts with pulling photos for shared posts through WordPress. Basically when you copy and paste a link into the profile update, the link preview isn’t pulling any information.

We’ve been getting a lot of Open Graph (OG) errors for link posts. Some of the errors include:

og:url – The URL of your object, e.g., “https://liontreegroup.com”
og:title – The title of your object to appear, e.g., “Why Facebook Search So Bad and Does it Matter?”
og:image – Any images represented at the destination URL
og:description – The link description (commonly meta description or initial text)

The quickest fix to this is run it through the Facebook Sharing Debugger. It’s in the developer tools and can be found here – https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/. If you are having trouble getting anything but the URL to show and you haven’t had other problems with links, if you paste the link into the debugger and click DEBUG, it will likely fix your problem.

Another quick fix is renaming the Permalink in WordPress. Simply change or word or charcter, then run it through the debugger to make sure it’s clean. This has been a good fix for me.

Editing Facebook Link Previews

Historically, you were able to simply paste the URL into the status update and it would bring through the Link Headline, Display Link, Description, and any Pictures on the page. You were able to edit everything including swapping photos for a link photo that you wanted to share. Take a look at this post from earlier in 2017 showing all of the editable areas of Facebook link preview.

In the post above, I was able to modify the Status Update, Image, Title, Description and URL before posting. After the Fake News bombardment, they rethought this practice and as of this month are limiting the ability to edit a post. Here’s the documentation from Facebook on this – https://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/2017/06/27/API-Change-Log-Modifying-Link-Previews/.

There are some real negatives to this because if you are a WordPress user, you’ll likely be using Yoast SEO. As you edit the snippet for a page or post, you’ll probably want to handle the post tagging with your location or business name. In the editable format, you could remove your name or any other information showing. You could also place a more impactful photo on Facebook versus a photo that fits well in your blog portfolio on your website.

While these were handy adjustments to posts, too many people were masking sites with different display URLs and posing as big name media companies.

When you post a link now, you’ll be stuck with a featured image from the post (you can add more than one, but they will crop and tile), and the link info will pull from the Yoast snippet in entirety. You won’t be able to edit this info. Notice the change in the title, description and image.

Changing Facebook Link Photos

One of the unforeseen issues we’ve had is changing post and page link images. When you create a page link preview in Facebook by pasting a URL in as a status update, it will grab photos from that page URL. Until recently, you could add a photo using the plus symbol underneath the post preview in Facebook and then remove the photos you don’t want listed. Unfortunately, now when you want to do a post link, you’ll need to add the specific image to the page before

How to Claim Facebook Link Ownership

Facebook Link Ownership is currently only available to publishers and media companies. It can be found in Publishing Tools and is listed as a menu item on the left side menu.

What if Link Ownership isn’t Available?

As of right now, wait it out.

Link Image Size

One thing that hasn’t changed is Facebook link post image size. The recommended size for full feed width is 1200 x 628 as of late 2017.

Documentation

https://developers.facebook.com/docs/sharing/opengraph/using-objects/

https://www.facebook.com/business/help/247886969033572

https://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/2017/06/27/API-Change-Log-Modifying-Link-Previews/

Next Steps to Addressing Link Preview Modification