In this episode, Michael and Carrie talk about how to ensure Facebook pulls the correct image from your website into your posts. A few years ago, users could share a link to Facebook and could add whatever image they wanted — as well as change the headline, description, etc. Facebook decided to stop allowing this as a way to cut down on spam.
Facebook built up bots that were able to crawl every page users wanted to share on Facebook. The bots would grab what they could find to pull into the post as an image, title (the HMTL title of the webpage), and description (meta description of the webpage). Images are a little more difficult since typically, they live amongst other content in blog posts.
The easiest way to nudge Facebook to pull the correct image is to use Open Graph, a markup language created by Facebook. Open Graph is a meta tag you can put on your webpage that allows you to fill out fields that give Facebook information about a webpage in a way it can understand. It tells the bots where to find the featured image, etc.
Whether or not you have to enter the code every time depends on your website. If you have Yoast (an SEO tool that most Infomedia clients use) and add a blog post to your website, Yoast has an option on the backend of your website that lets you fill out Open Graph information in an easy way. This even lets you use a different image with Open Graph than what is (or is not) on your page.