Fix: Image Not Showing When Sharing URL on Facebook
The other day I wrote a blog post on how to find where your stuff’s been shared on social media. I wanted to share my post with my friends on Facebook, but to my dismay, a horrible thing happened!
I posted my link and Facebook refused to pull up the image from my blog post. Nobody wants to just click a link without a picture or anything describing the link. No description? No traffic.
But alas, there is a fix for this. Facebook has a handy tool called the Open Graph Object Debugger.
You head on over to this handy little thing and paste your problem URL in the box and voilà… well, your problems aren’t solved. But… it tells you what kind of beast you have to fight.
The debugger gave me the following information:
More Than One OG URL Specified:
Object at URL ‘http://writealoud.com/social-media-how-to-find-where-your-content-was-shared/’ of type ‘article’ is invalid because it specifies multiple ‘og:url’ values…
Basically, this note is saying that I have too much Facebook going on in my blog. This is true, I had accidentally turned on an alternate Facebook plug-in. Both plugins are adding open graph meta (which is confusing for Facebook.)
So, if you’re having trouble with Facebook pulling up images from your URLs, check out the debugger. If it throws up the same error you’ve probably got plug-ins fighting over the Open Graphs Meta heart. Open your WordPress plug-in page and dig around to see what is throwing out og tags. You can also open your website in developer mode to view to code to see if, in fact, your site is actually sending out competing og tags.
If you don't have any og tags set:
The other case might be that none of your images are sending out og tags, in which case you'll want to install a plug-in to handle your social media tags. I strongly recommend getting one for Pinterest too, especially if Pinterest isn't recognizing your images. (Pinterest is huge for getting traffic through your images.)
If the debugger is showing that you don’t have any og data specified, here is a guide to get facebook images to show.
If it’s a different error, head on over to Google and ask it to fix your problems… err, I mean, search for it. If all else fails, hit me up. I’d be happy to help.