If you’re having trouble with your link preview on Facebook, there is a tool called the Sharing Debugger that can provide some insight. Maybe you drafted a Facebook post and inserted the link to a blog post you wrote but, after seeing the link preview, you decided that you wanted to use a different photo. Facebook used to allow you to change the image or title on the platform but that is no longer the case.
Sometimes if you go back to your blog post and change the photo, you’ll see the new image pulled in automatically. Occasionally, the old photo that you had in your blog still shows up in the Facebook link preview even though you changed it. This is because Facebook super caches things to help the app remain speedy. It means in the background, Facebook went and looked at your blog post once and doesn’t think it needs to go look again because it assumes you haven’t changed anything. What you need to do is tell Facebook to go look again.
The Facebook Sharing Debugger is a tool where you can enter the URL you plan to share. It will show you a preview of what Facebook will display. If the photo or other information looks old, just hit the “Scrape Again” button and it should pull in the updated image from your URL.
If you are having trouble getting Facebook to grab the correct image, you can put in specific open graph fields that tell it what to grab. This might be something you have to talk to your web developer about. If you’re using WordPress, you can use a plugin to create those fields.
It might seem like this is a lot of headache to go through to get the right link preview but a good image can drive significantly more audience engagement than one that cuts off the important parts or doesn’t quite fit into the frame.
