Facebook Thumbnails
Restored from the Empower Network archive (2011–2017), lightly edited to meet our current advertising standards. Views are the original author’s.
Has inserting images from your blog into your Facebook update got you running round like a headless chicken?
So you’ve spent time crafting a great blog article.
You’ve inserted a brilliant picture to illustrate a key point, liven things up and hopefully raise a smile.
It all looks great.
Then you post it on FaceBook, and instead of your carefully chosen image, you get a default image or worse still, no image at all. You feel like you wasted your time!
Here’s 2 ways to overcome that.
1. Whilst you are still working on your post in WordPress, choose one of the pictures in your post to use as the “featured image”.
2. When you are putting the post into your FaceBook Status update, select an picture from your computer.
Let’s go through each of those step by step.
1. Choose featured image in WordPress
When you are writing your post and inserting pictures, choose one to be the featured image.
All you need to do is click the “use as featured image” link when you are setting up the image details, just before you click “insert into post”.
I’m going to insert the smiley wordpress logo you can see at the top of this post and set it as the featured image and show you the screen shot below – see the yellow highlight on the link at the bottom:
Screen shot – see the highlighted link
NOTE: selecting the Thumbnail SIZE does NOT make the picture the featured image, even though what gets shown in Facebook gets referred to as a thumbnail!!!
What if I forget?
If, when you insert the picture into your post, you forget to click the “use as featured image” link, you have two more options:
- Click on the picture in the editor – you will see two little icons appear in the top left; one is a little landscape icon, the other a delete image icon. Click the landscape icon and you get the image editor box again – just click the “use as featured image” link as above
- In the right hand column of your WordPress editor, below the categories and tags areas, you should see a Featured Image box. Simply paste the URL of the image there (you will need to navigate to the image in your media gallery to get the URL)
When you put the URL of your blog post into your FaceBook status update, it will automatically put the featured image you chose beside the blog title and link. Here’s one I made earlier for another post…..
2. Add an image to your FaceBook update
Alternately, if your blog post doesn’t have an image you want to use as “featured”, or you want to add a bigger, or different image (instead of the thumbnail) when you post your blog article as a FaceBook update, here’s what to do:
Publish your blog post and write your status update in Facebook, adding your link as normal. You can see below how the link pulls in the text – in this case there is no featured image:
Screen shot – facebook status update
Before you hit “post”, click on the “Photo” button as highlighted inthe screen shot above.
It will look like your status update and link have disappeared, but they haven’t! When you click on “Upload Photo/Video” it will re-appear and you can navigate to any image you want that is stored on your computer using the “choose file” button.
You won’t see the image appear until you click on “post” – and then you get something like this, with the link in the text and the picture you chose filling the width of the status update:
Great picture – eh? 
Whichever way you choose, adding images to your posts and updates adds colour & texture and will undoubtedly boost the number of comments and likes you get – after all A Picture Says A Thousand Words!
Allthebest
Alan B
(PS: I confess – my wife is the one who writes these “How To” posts, so Thank you Lesley!)