Social previews in Yoast SEO visualize what your post will look like when shared on Facebook or Twitter. You can see right away if your image fits and whether your title and description will display well. It works much like the snippet preview people have come so used to. As the snippet preview does for search rankings, we think social previews will improve your social workflow.
Which image will Facebook pick?
When you publish a post and you haven’t specifically selected a Facebook image in our plugin, you don’t know which picture Facebook will use. Yoast SEO has a big hand in this process: it determines which images it “gives” Facebook with its metadata. When you specify a Facebook image, it specifies just that image. When you set a featured image for your post, that’s the image it will feed to Facebook. If you have no featured image either, it will grab the images from your post. The Social preview feature in Yoast SEO Premium takes the guesswork away and shows you what Facebook will use.
It looks like this for this post (because I haven’t specified a specific Facebook image yet):
Social image before specifying a specific Facebook image
As you can see this allows me to preview what my post will look like when shared on Facebook. We have a similar preview for Twitter. Both previews also have edit fields below them, allowing you to change the Facebook and Twitter social image and other individual metadata. That looks like this:
As you can see in the image above, you can upload a specific Twitter image. The one you’re seeing in the preview is the Facebook image I uploaded. If you only specify a Facebook image, Twitter will use that image too, which often works just fine. The description underneath that actually comes from the meta description.
Social networks all need similar data. All of them seem to fall back to Facebook OpenGraph data when no specific data was specified. Twitter and Pinterest also use Facebook OpenGraph metadata. WhatsApp uses OpenGraph too when sharing URLs in the messaging app. This is why Facebook OpenGraph is such an important part of our plugin. The previews will show you exactly what’s being used and what your post will look like.
Joost is an internet entrepreneur and the founder of Yoast. He has a long history in WordPress and digital marketing. On our blog, he has written a lot about SEO in general, technical SEO and important topics related to SEO.
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5 Responses to Social previews in Yoast SEO Premium
Zander • 5 years ago
Bummer that this is limited to Yoast SEO Premium, as this would have been a handy feature to have. :(
Ciprian • 5 years ago
I use the Facebook debug feature before sharing any post – https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/ – it’s an extra step, but I’m happy with it so far. Also, if I’m using Buffer (around 50% of my shares), it will automatically pick up the correct image or give me the option to select one from a list.
Mount Woods • 5 years ago
Great post, thanks for posting such relevant information for your readers. Also a big fan of your “Social Previews” they really helo a lot in terms of social media. Good work, keep it up.
Pratap • 5 years ago
Its really good helpful tool and suggestion while positing images and content in the social media thanks for the good article
Caleb Schallert • 5 years ago
I use Yoast SEO almost daily and I think this new feature is very helpful when sharing content on Facebook and Twitter. Cant wait to see what you guys come up with next! ??
Bummer that this is limited to Yoast SEO Premium, as this would have been a handy feature to have. :(
I use the Facebook debug feature before sharing any post – https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/ – it’s an extra step, but I’m happy with it so far. Also, if I’m using Buffer (around 50% of my shares), it will automatically pick up the correct image or give me the option to select one from a list.
Great post, thanks for posting such relevant information for your readers. Also a big fan of your “Social Previews” they really helo a lot in terms of social media. Good work, keep it up.
Its really good helpful tool and suggestion while positing images and content in the social media thanks for the good article
I use Yoast SEO almost daily and I think this new feature is very helpful when sharing content on Facebook and Twitter. Cant wait to see what you guys come up with next! ??