In an effort to combat fake news, Facebook has made major changes to the way its users post articles and blogs. Before, when you pasted a link into Facebook, you had the ability to swap out the featured image with one of your own, edit the meta description to say whatever you wanted, and change the meta title for something a little more click-worthy.
Now, you can’t do any of that. Whatever auto-populates when you post the link is what you’re stuck with – period.
What Does This Mean for You?
Here at Uptick, we used to be able to choose custom images for each article we posted. We could even brand them for ourselves and our clients. For example, we could take this article from Forbes and make it look like this:
But now, thanks to these new Facebook changes, we can’t do that anymore. The same post from above now looks like this:
So the images we have to choose from are only the ones from the specific page being shared.
This is also true for anything you share from your website. You can no longer add custom images, titles, or descriptions. Instead, it will pull the image options from your website, your meta title, and your meta description. If you have SEO done correctly on your website, then this isn’t a huge issue.
For example, Uptick’s video page pulls up like this:
Looks great, right?
The downside is that every time we share this page on Facebook, these are our ONLY image options because they are the only images on that page.
However, if your website is not fully search engine optimized with correctly sized images and information, then it may look very bad – blurry, zoomed-in logos getting pulled in as featured images, an image that isn’t even relevant to the page you’re posting, or no image at all.
Additionally, you may see something like “page-title” where a title should be on your post (but isn’t), or a description that contains errors or doesn’t make sense.
In short, without good SEO on your website, things can get ugly, fast.
What Is the Solution?
Hopefully, Facebook will see this as an issue and make it so that people can at least edit the information coming from their own domains moving forward (not very likely). In the meantime, you need great and intentional SEO, including high-quality, properly-sized images on every single page of your website.
Need help updating your website in the wake of Facebook’s changes? Contact us today!
