No matter what blogging platform or engine you are using, getting your articles to have those nice catchy social media share thumbnails is a very simple process.
This article will focus on primarily on WordPress based blogs and custom HTML static sites but the general idea is the same and will work on any platform.
Basically what’s happening is that when Facebook and Twitter – the two biggest social media aggregators – crawl your blog post they are looking for Open Graph meta tags that tell them to use the specified content and if the bots don’t find the OG tags they will improvise and pull whatever data they can from the article. Which isn’t always the best. We want to optimize and control the data for maximum impact.
Why you should include and optimize Open Graph tags.
When people are doom scrolling through their social media they are more likely to pause and click your shared content if it has optimized OG tags, which in turn means more social media referral to your blog.
For example: which one are you more likely to click?
As you can see with proper OG Tags, image B is a clear winner.
- OG tags make content more eye-catching in social media feeds.
- OG tags summarize what the content is about at a glance.
- They help Facebook understand, which helps them recommend it to the right audience.
So, how do we utilize this to make your blog posts catchy and increase social traffic? Easy.
First we need to generate a catchy thumbnail. With Thumbnail.ai you can generate a thumbnail in 1 second.
Secondly we need to specify that thumbnail in the OG tag. Just download and activate the Open Graph and Twitter Cards plugin.
Once you’ve activated the plugin, open to edit any of your blog posts and at the bottom you will see where you can specify an open graph image (link or upload) to be used for the blog post. It’s that simple.
Save and hit publish and your articles will now include catchy thumbnails.
To verify the proper installation of the open graph tags you can check your article on the facebook debugger.