Ever notice when you click to share something on Facebook and it sometimes doesn’t display an image? Does that make you as crazy as it makes me? Or, sometimes it gives 20 thumbnails to choose from, but the one image you want to share is not one of the thumbnails you can choose from. Well… here’s my helpful tip of the week!

If you are website builder, and take social sharing seriously – take the time to select which image you want associated with a given page when sharing socially. Let’s review.

The following page is a gallery page of an Angry Birds Theme Cake (pretty slick cake too if you ask me!).

I want to share this to Facebook!

If I just add the sharing code without specifying the image, it actually displayed no image whatsoever. Frustrating right?!? Especially when the thing you want to share is all about the visual appeal! The ShareThis tool (like many other social sharing tools) pulls the link title (display text) from your code META Title (so word it carefully). But the image thumbnail also needs to be specified. To do that you simply need to add a snippet of code in your header. Here’s an example:

That one simple tag will then pull that image and display it when someone shares your page to Facebook giving it more appeal and promoting further sharing.

By taking a few extra minutes to think through which image will best represent your page, you are creating a more socially appealing experience for the person sharing, and for their social networks. It also stands to reason that the content you’ve shared will be shared again and again!

Hope this information helps! Go get social!

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