Share blog post to Facebook

RickJohnsonPhotography

Apologies if I'm in the wrong place.

I would like to share blog posts with my Facebook account. I added share buttons to a blog post and although it works for Google+ and Twitter, it does not work for Facebook.

I am aware that I can copy the url for the blog post and paste it in to a Facebook status, but I'd much rather use the share button to share.

Any help would be much appreciated.

Rick

tomnovy

Hi Rick,

Could you please provide us with the blog post that you would like to share? We would love to check this for you.

Standing by

W.W. Webster

Be aware that Facebook will find look for and find an/the image in your post and create a thumbnail which has the bizarre aspect ratio of 484px x 252px. It is very undiscriminating in how it takes this crop, which can lead to a very unflattering and unacceptable thumbnails in your Facebook posts. And you cannot change this - once you link to the post, the thumbnail is fixed. If you replace the image in your blog, Facebook has remembered the original image and won't change it.

To overcome this and to have a little more control, I will often first post a version of my image to my blog cropped to the Facebook aspect ratio so I know how the image will be displayed in Facebook. I next copy a link to the blog entry URL and then paste this into a new Facebook timeline post - but without actually 'posting' it. After a few moments, the Facebook thumbnail (in my preferred crop) will appear below. I then delete the blog post URL from the Facebook post as this is butt-ugly and superfluous as the thumbnail will remain. I can then enter any text for my Facebook post as normal, but still without 'posting' it at this stage.

I then go back to my blog and replace the Facebook crop of the image with a version cropped as I want my blog visitors to see it. Then I 'post' my Facebook post.

Now, visitors to my Facebook page will see the most pleasing thumbnail I can provide within the Facebook 484px x 252px constraint, but when they click-through to the blog, my preferred crop is displayed.

This process may seem complicated but quickly becomes instinctive. Facebook wants you to post images directly there, not link to them elsewhere, so they can effectively assume ownership rights over your work. Therefore they make life difficult for those of us who won't play their game by not allowing linked images to display to the height they allow for images posted on Facebook. My approach is a workaround that works for me (I only ever include one image in my blog posts) and my be helpful for some, but how others want to link blog posts on Facebook is entirely over to them!