Optimising your web pages for being shared on facebook

Sharing links on Facebook is a growth activity. Is your website optimised for it?

Have you noticed when you share a link on Facebook, you can choose a thumbnail image. Facebook get the list of images by scanning the URL you want to share for any images that are placed on the page. Sometimes that works well, other times it doesn’t pick the image you want.

How would you like to be able to choose what image is selected as the thumbnail for your page when it’s shared?

Facebook’s page of advice on how to best format your page for sharing on their site

http://www.facebook.com/share_partners.php – recommends putting in the head are of the html document something like the following:

<link rel=”image_src” href=”images/my-thumbnail.jpg” />

There are further options for multiple media types and they’re worth looking into if your site is sharing audio or video files.

If your pages aren’t hand-coded (and whose are), press your CMS/eCommerce site provider to give you control to decide which image on a page should be the chosen thumbnail, or set a site-wide default (your logo perhaps?).

If you’re using WordPress and your theme makes use of the (new since WordPress 2.9) post thumbnail feature, there’s a handy plugin that makes sure your post thumbnail is the image that shows up.

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