How do I share my post on Facebook the way you did?

 In my business, working with social media is like second nature. I do it every day, so it seems simple. Sometimes when I think about teaching social media to others, I feel like I need to teach the advanced concepts – cutting edge strategies and techniques.

What people in my industry easily forget, myself included, is that everyone needs to start at the beginning. We may assume our clients, students or followers have a certain level of knowledge already, so we tend to skip the basics. The result may be small business owners trying to jump in, but fumbling around on the dock, still trying to figure out how to get their feet in the water – while we’re busy trying to teach them how to swim the butterfly.

As part of my services, I help my clients publish their blog posts and share them on their social media channels. I recently had a client try to share a blog post herself, and it just wasn’t coming out like mine, so she asked me to teach her how to do it. I know other people could benefit from these guidelines too, so here we go.

How to Share Your Blog Post On Facebook

When you share a link on Facebook, it will automatically pull in some information from the page you’re sharing, so you actually need to start by making sure that information is there, on your blog. The details of how to do this could be an entire post so I won’t go into them here, but I’ll show you what information is being pulled from the blog post:

In the link preview that Facebook generates, they’ll pull the title from your blog post title. This isn’t necessarily the title on your page, but the SEO Title that shows up in the tab in the browser. Below that you’ll see your domain name. It’s not the full url link to the post, but the top level domain name. Below that, you’ll see a description from your blog post’s meta description field. If you don’t have a meta description, Facebook may pull this from the beginning of your post, or they may just leave it blank. If you use WordPress for your blog, WordPress will usually fill these fields in with default content from your post if you don’t enter them manually through an SEO plugin.

You may have noticed I didn’t point out the text that comes before the link profile. This is where you get to customize your link shares. You write this when you post the link. Sometimes you’ll see the post title repeated here, or nothing at all. It’s really better to write a short comment when you share a post. You want to write something that introduces what the post is about and grabs the reader’s attention so they’ll want to click and read more. That’s your goal, right?

The image also comes from your post. If you have a featured image, usually that will be selected. The nice thing about Facebook is it will allow you to scroll through your image options, or even upload another image! Did you notice how this image is small and to the left of the post information? Undoubtedly you’ve seen other links where the image fills the whole width of the post.

In order to have your image displayed in large format like the example from Dr. Lamberton’s page, you’ll need it to be big enough, and the right dimensions. I usually make my images 625 px wide x 327 high, which follows Facebooks aspect ratio recommendation of 1.91:1. This will make a nice heading on your blog post, and will also be the right proportion to show up in the larger format when you share the post on Facebook. If your image is taller than this ratio, or even square, but still at least 600 px wide, the center part of your image will be shown, with the top and bottom cropped off in equal amounts. Here is what Facebook has published in their ‘best practices‘ guidelines:

Use images that are at least 1200 x 630 pixels for the best display on high resolution devices. At the minimum, you should use images that are 600 x 315 pixels to display link page posts with larger images.

 How To Post Your Link

1. Go to your Facebook Page and make sure the top of your screen says, “Posting as [Your Page Name],” rather than posting as yourself. If it says you’re posting as yourself, there should be an option that says, “Change to [Your Page Name].” If you don’t see either, you may not be an admin of your Page.
2. At the top of the feed, where it says, “What have you been up to?,” click your cursor and star typing your introduction.
3. After your comments, paste the link – your blog post url. *IMPORTANT* Make sure you are posting the link to the actual page, not your blog’s homepage! To do this, go to your blog, find the post you want to share, then click on the post title. With most blog platforms, this will take you to the page just for this post. Go to the address bar of your web browser, highlight the url, and copy it. Then go back to your Facebook status update and paste in the url.
4. Once the link has been pasted, you’ll see the preview show up. If there are arrows over the image, you can scroll through different image options to select the image you’d like to use, or you can upload a new one.
5. Before you publish your link, you can go back to the update portion where you pasted the url and delete the link from the text area. The link will remain below your post, and your comment will look cleaner, shorter and easier to read.
6. Make sure you’re happy with the result, then click the Post button.