How to get an image to show with your shared link on Facebook

Have you ever tried to share a link in an FB post and were frustrated when a thumbnail image didn’t show up with the blurb? Those all-text posts sure look boring…

If so, try putting the URL in Facebook’s Debugging tool: https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug

The tool will tell you why an image isn’t appearing with your link (along with a lot of other meta data). It’s most likely because the image on the webpage you’re sharing is too small (it has to be a minimum of 200×200 px wide to be included as a thumbnail). If you’re sharing a link to a webpage under your control, you can modify the page to make sure the image is large enough to appear with your FB post.

I also use this tool to make Facebook “aware” of new images I’ve added to our webpages. For instance, if I just recently added an image to one of our blog posts that I want to share on FB, the thumbnail will not show when I share it since the change is too recent and the page hasn’t been re-crawled yet. If I go to the debugging tool above and enter the URL to the blog post, Facebook will re-crawl the page and immediately add the thumbnail image the next time I try to post it.