Why no image appears in my social media status update when I share a link from my blog?

Have you ever been frustrated that no image appears on LinkedIn when you share a link in your status update whilst nobody else on the social network seems to have this problem? Well if that’s your case there might be a solution …if you are using a WordPress site (it might works equally with other types of websites but I haven’t tested it).

Why is this important to solve? Many researches show that posts and updates with an image or a visual element are more likely to be clicked than those without one.

Step 1

Add to your WordPress site a free plugin called WordPress SEO by Yeost. It’s a brilliant plugin that I have only discovered recently which kills many birds with one stone, literally. I love it. The main purpose of this plugin as its name suggests is to help optimise your posts for SEO in every sense of the word. It is very intuitive as it takes you through a checklist of what you need to verify to ensure your content is well optimised.

Step 2

Once you install and activate the plugin this is what you see below the post on the ’General’ tab.

Follow the instructions and ensure you optimise the points in red as it shows.

Step 3

On the next tab ‘Page analysis’ you have a diagnostic of what works and what needs to be improved.

Similar to the traffic light or a project management reporting, it shows the status of your optimisation: Red is for bad, Amber for ok and Green for good and well-optimised content.  Step 4

Click on the ‘social’ tab to add the image to display in social media to come back to the main purpose of this post, which is to show you how to display this eluding photo when you share the link of your blog post in your status update.

One thing, however worth noting, is that this issue doesn’t occur if you publish directly your post on LinkedIn.

The image that you add gets displayed automatically as a thumbnail. It only applies to the posts that you create on your own blog and share on LinkedIn as a status update.

Ok there is no ‘LinkedIn’ section here but I found that the Facebook image works well for LinkedIn too. Go ahead and enter the title you want to see displayed on social media. It can be different than your actual post title, a description and upload the image resized as 1200x 628px.

You can add the same photo or choose another one. Make the other adjustments suggested until the post’s status is ‘Green’ or at least ‘Amber ‘and publish. Now grab the permalink of your post and share it as an update on your LinkedIn profile. It should display a nice image on the left side.

And your post is fully optimised for the search engines too.

Et voila! Do you have another way to get to the same result? If so please share it below. I’d like to hear from you.

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