When posting to Facebook to promote your blog post you want to make your entries stand out from the crowd and an obvious way to do this is with an attractive image. An optimized Facebook post will attract more likes and the desired effect of more click-throughs to your blog post.
The facebook post below would have been text only with no image at all if I had not optimized it.
When pasting the link into the post, Facebook will automatically scan your blog post and prepare a list of candidate thumbnails for you to choose your preferred image. This scan does not look at any background images on the page, just the foreground images. But what do you do if there are no foreground images at all? Your Facebook will not have the all important thumbnail to attract attention.
This will typically be the case for your squeeze pages which either have no images at all or perhaps just a button or other graphics that are not appropriate for promoting the entire blog post.
Yoast To The Rescue
The WordPress SEO plugin by Yoast comes to the rescue here by allowing you to supply both the URL of the image that you want Facebook to use and a custom page description. The plugin adds a box on the Edit Post admin page where you can sprinkle the SEO fairy dust that will help get your post shared more.
In the example below I enter the URL of the striking image of the Grand Canal of Venice (which is the background image of the squeeze page) as the thumbnail and create a call to action as my description to try and sell the click.
Click for more on how we created this mobile responsive squeeze page with its background that stretches or shrinks to fit the device / window size.
