Ok, seriously, this frustrates the hell out of me…
…almost to the point of turning green and going hulk on my computer. But because people are around me I tend to boil in silence with a fake smile. I don’t want to be that guy.
You finish your blog post, copy the address and go to share it with all of your Facebook fans! But the preview doesn’t show up and you get something like this:
Damn.
How can I catch my fans’ attention with no bright flashy image? No description? My god this is annoying.
So you try to input a shorter link, or maybe remove the slash from the end of the address. Hopefully it reloads. Nope.
Luckily there’s a fix!
What are you going to do? Visit this page. Then…
Make sure you’re on the ‘Sharing Debugger’ tab, then simply put the address into text field and click the button that says ‘Debug’.
Head back to your post, refresh the page and type the address in again. Tada! You’re Link preview should show up. Not every single time, but a good 90%+ of the time this fixes it.
Did this work for you? Why not share on Facebook or Tweet out on Twitter!
But…
What if that doesn’t work?
Type out a message, paste the link and remove the preview window. Then add a catchy image that attracts your readers eye and you’ll get a similar result:
Note: Learn more about Social Media image sizes here.
Of course the link won’t click through to an article, but it’s better than plain text.
So that’s it! Short and sweet. Hopefully next time you get stuck you’ll be able to go through this process and avoid the frustration. Thanks for reading!
Check out our Photoshop Template Pack for Facebook here!
I was hoping for the solution to the problem. I mean other people who share links from my page can’t be expected to go to the open graph debug page and scrape the url to make images appear.
I haven’t had the time yet to find out why this isn’t working with some pages. But if you have a clue I’m thanksful for the info!
Yeah I’m not sure, it’s just a weird problem and true, you can’t control how your fans share links. You could try using Social Meta data (if you use WordPress, there’s the Yoast SEO plugin which has the option), that might smooth things out a bit.
Hi! This is driving my crazy, too :/ I used the debugger to debug my IG link that does not shop up and every time I scrape the URL, another error message shows up (image too small, missing properties fb:app_id etc.) Can´t figure out why. Sraping does not help. Any other ideas? Thx!
I know that’s frustrating! IG doesn’t seem to list a decent sized image in the meta data so you get nothing. I don’t know of a fix unfortunately :( You can share posts easily enough but the only work around may be to add an image position facebook with the URL (as it will be clickable) in the post text. I wish I had a better solution sorry.
Thank you. This worked a treat and only took me a couple of minutes because of the links you provided.
Glad I could help Rowena. Needless to say it’s been a lifesaver for me too!
Awesome. Thanks a lot. This was super helpful and just what we needed. Thank you!
The debugging worked, thanks for the advice!
Awesome Emily!
This didn’t work for me
That’s not good, did you try it a couple of times? The other option of course is upload an image, and type the description into the link – which can be done on a computer by simply clicking on the link preview before sharing and editing :)
Thank you, it helped. I had to use it to Share THIS page on my facebook too, though. Gotta love Bookface… um, I mean Facebook! (rolls eyes)
Haha, thanks Barbara! Legendary :)
Please, how do I unblock a blocked link on facebook?
Hi Michael, I’m sorry I don;t have any experience in unblocking a website that is already blocked. I wish I could be of more help. I did find this article which may help (you may have already seen it though): https://unorthodox.tech/website-blocked-by-facebook/
I hope that is helpful. I’m sorry to hear about the difficulty you’re having :(
I so much thank you because am having this problem for long time now but it solved thanks
Excellent, glad I could help!
This didn’t work for me, but something very similar worked: After you fetch new scrape info, scroll down to where it says “When shared, this is what will be included.” At the bottom of this area, click on “See this in the share dialog.” From here, you can share the link with the preview.
That’s awesome, thanks for the tip James I’ll try it out next time :)
Thank you all for this help!
You’re welcome Beth :)
Thank you. I’ve tried several other “fixes,” and yours did it on the first try.
Penny
Glad I could help Penny!
Thanks Dude>>> You Provided the Great Resolution
Keep it up
Thanks Karan, glad I could help!
You can try https://socialport.io. Our web app can help you set a custom link preview for facebook or twitter. We can generate a shortened link for sharing.
Sometimes, the link preview image may be distorted. It may not look good.
More details here: https://blog.seo-product-optimizer.com/index.php/2018/03/01/launching-socialport/
Well, when I share a link from my page and there is an external link in ( credit to Instagram owner/ or weblink ) I don’t get a preview and reach on a 2 mil page is like 10 people. When I share a picture with no caption ( external URL ) the reach is 50k-200k. Article shares don’t work… Response from Facebook = Zero
I’m with you there. I’ve noticed that works a lot better :)
Wow what magic is that! It worked – thank you very much for sharing. For a moment there I was afraid no one would read my plain-text link, and even restarted the laptop – now the images are up as normal, thanks to you.
Glad to hear Elle! :)
Thanks for this. It’s odd how hit-and-miss Facebook can be about showing previews. This worked like a charm!
I know what you mean! Thanks for comment Kevin :)
Great Article Wade!! i did the for my Facebook page of Letzhealthy.com and it solves the purpose.
That’s awesome, glad I could help :)
I know this is old, but thank you, worked like a charm man. That’s real nice of you, your helping out a lot of frustrated people.
All of a sudden all external links on my Facebook page look older (small thumbnail), and also the Carousel option is missing completely. (Upload Photos). I manage several pages for clients, and this only happens on a couple pages. Have you had this issue? I cannot create a photo carousel, and all external URL’s look bad. I’ve tried debugger, but makes no difference.
Hi Clint, I’ve had that happen once or twice actually. It’s a major pain and I didn’t have much luck. I tried sharing the same URL with or without the ‘www’ just to get it to make a fresh attempt.
I wish I had more info for you. Do you use Open Graph Metadata on the website or anything like that? You can set photos on the website itself for Facebook to use if you do.
I don’t want my link to fetch preview. How can I do?
That’s a bit funny, I couldn’t give you any information on blogger in particular. Facebook can be a strange platform, I wish I knew more about why it simply refuses to work properly at times.
Tried your suggestion but didn’t work.
Facebook tells me …… Object Missing a Required Value?
Time to see if I can figure out what is meant by this error.
Thats a weird one. I’m not sure either. Sorry Greg :(
Hi, I’ve tried all the above methods but that none is useful for me. Facebook developer tool shows following errors:
Warnings That Should Be Fixed
Curl Error
Curl error: 61 (BAD_CONTENT_ENCODING)
Inferred Property
The ‘og:image’ property should be explicitly provided, even if a value can be inferred from other tags.
Missing Properties
The following required properties are missing: og:url, og:type, og:title, og:image, og:description, fb:app_id
Any idea what to do?
I’m not 100% sure there. It works most of the time for me but I do get errors occasionally. Can you add in the Open Graph Meta data also?
Another thing I’ve tried in the past is getting a different version of the URL (with or without www as an example). Another option is to share an image with the URL in the post text if it absolutely will not work.
Wade this fixed my post immediately, thanks so much! Even though the debugger said no problems found, but when I created a new post entry on Facebook after running the debug on the page you linked to, the Facebook link preview loaded up no problem (had not loaded until I tried your fix).
That’s awesome, I’m glad this method helped Karen :) Thank for your comment also, it’s greatly appreciated!
I did this a million times and it wouldn’t work. Finally, I went back to WordPress and changed ONE word in my social title. Then it worked. *shrug* Technology is weird.
Thanks for the help!
oh how frustrating!! I’m glad you go there in the end :)
my website url preview and feature image is not showing in a Facebook post but its show perfectly on Facebook Debugger tool
Sorry mate, I wish I knew how to fix that, sometimes the problems seems unfixable using this method. That’s frustrating :(
Just frustrated, nothing works for me.
I’m sorry to hear that mate. This works a lot of the time but isn’t 100%.
Thanks it worked for me…………………. Satisfied by your guide
10 years too late to comment, but it still helped me!
Figured it was the crawler or webhost causing problems lol