We previously wrote a quick guide on how to get the right thumbnail to show when posting a link on Facebook. Unfortunately this method did not always work, so we could not hide our excitement yesterday when we discovered that Facebook has made it possible to upload an image when posting a link on Facebook.
To show how helpful a function this can be, let me take this post from Jon Loomer as an example:
His post links to a blog post titled “Facebook EdgeRank: Which Post Type is Best“, and the only image included in the article is this one
This image is 600×286 large, and the thumbnail that shows up in my feed is just 90×90 pixels. While it seems to change all the time, I believe the ideal thumbnail size on Facebook currently is 154×154 pixels, so preferably the thumbnail used should be a square and 154×154 pixels or more. I did not want to spend much time on this, so I created a slightly distorted thumbnail based on Jon’s original:
When posting the link on Facebook, I decide to use the “Upload Image” function:
After posting the test post, I took another screenshot to show how the two compare in my feed:
In summary, this shows the importance of selecting a square thumbnail when posting a link on Facebook. The story will look bigger in the feed in addition to looking much nicer. For blog posts with a large number of images, particularly blog posts with more than 10 pictures, until now it could be quite a headache to get the right thumbnail to appear on Facebook. Luckily, now that the “upload image” function has been made available, this is no longer the case.
The only thing to keep in mind is that images uploaded will end up in your photo gallery, more specifically in the “Timeline Photos”. I have not tried deleting them yet, but one alternative is to simply add a picture description with a link to the applicable blog post. When a link post has been scheduled, my understanding is that the image does not get added to “Timeline Photos”, but I’ve not had a chance to test this thoroughly.