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John Hanlon Reviews

John’s Monday Tip of the Week: Getting images primed for Facebook

Good evening, friends

Last weekend, our Monday Tip of the Week focused on the importance of meta descriptions and why they are so important for social media websites. This week, I wanted to let you all know how to set up images on your back pages that would work well on social media websites.

That brings us to John’s Monday Tip of the Week.

Several weeks ago, our friends in St. Louis contacted us about linking to their mobile apps page (a page I discussed a bit in last week’s tip). They sent us the screenshot below showing what it looked like when the station attempted to link to this page on Facebook.

As you can see, the image that Facebook chose for this page a.) isn’t directly related to the mobile apps page and b.) is being cut off.

Our development team looked into this and we discovered that Facebook has set up specific criteria for the images they use when pages are being promoted on their site.

When that criteria isn’t being met, Facebook sometimes chooses whatever image it wants for the post (here, it chose the station’s logo).

After doing some research, our lead developer discovered that we can set up an image that meets the ratio Facebook likes and that image is often chosen by the social media site when that page is linked to.

In this case, we took the large image that appeared on the WSDZ mobile apps page and we split it into two smaller images that were both 1000×524 (Don’t worry. The image didn’t appear that huge on the site. With responsive design, it shrank down to an appropriate size.)

If you’re looking into more specifics about Facebook’s preferred ratio, here it is:

Facebook’s preferred ratio is “1.91×1” meaning that the ideal ratio for an image that is 1200 pixels wide is “1200×628.” The ideal ratio for an image that is 600 pixels high is “1146×600.”

The results of resizing the image on WSDZ’s mobile apps page were quickly realized. Here’s what a user would see if they linked to this station’s mobile apps page today.

Clearly, this situation is not ideal but following Facebook’s preferred ratio standards would improve how our back pages look when they are linked t on Facebook.

I know each station has a few really important pages they want to spread the word about (the mobile apps page, contest pages etc.)

Following the steps above could improve what those pages look like when users share them, making Facebook readers more enticed to visit our sites.

This has been John’s Monday Tip of the Week.

Have a great week, y’all!

Best.

John P. Hanlon

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