Using your Facebook page to feature pages from your website is a great way to extend your reach and make your content serve double duty. It’s as simple as creating a Facebook post and including the URL of your web page. Facebook pulls in some text, finds an image and creates a link to the page. But did you know that you can control the text and image that Facebook uses?

Any website can add tags from the Open Graph Protocol, which is used by Facebook to better understand the different parts of a web page. While it’s possible to add these tags manually, most WordPress websites will use a plugin that creates the tags automatically for each page. I use the stand-alone plugin Facebook Open Graph, Google+ and Twitter Card Tags. SEO plugins like Yoast and The SEO Framework also include support for Open Graph. No matter which plugin is used, there will be a place to configure some defaults, including an image for Facebook to use if one isn’t specified for a particular page. After installing one of these plugins, the page editor will display new fields where you can enter a custom description and image for Facebook to use.

Did it work?

After making these changes to your site, you’ll want to make sure that Facebook is picking them up. Luckily, Facebook has a super useful tool to preview how a website page linked from a Facebook post will look, called the Sharing Debugger. Here’s how to use it:

• Enter the URL of the page to check and click the Debug button. If Facebook already has the page cached, it will be displayed. Otherwise, click the "Fetch new information" button.
• To change the image or text displayed by Facebook, update the page in WordPress, then click the "Scrape Again" button.
• Sometimes, Facebook displays the wrong image or text, just because. Clicking "Scrape Again" sometimes fixes it.
• Facebook may have many of your existing pages cached using the wrong images and text. After making changes in WordPress, you can update each one by loading it into the debugger and clicking Scrape Again.

With control over how Facebook displays your pages, you can create a much more enticing preview for Facebook users, making them more likely to click through to your site.

Until next week...