Although WordPress does a good job of making your content easily shareable, controlling the text/image the user sees when sharing your content can be tricky, as WP has no feature for controlling this text and you could be seeing unexpected results. Thankfully, as with any area where WordPress is lacking, there is a plugin to help.
Facebook Open Graph, Google+ and Twitter Card Tags
Using Facebook Open Graph, Google+ and Twitter Card Tags is a breeze, and it goes a long way to really tailoring what the user sees when sharing your posts/pages. To begin, head to Plugins in your WordPress admin area and install the plugin using our handy guide. Once done, head to the Settings area in your Dashboard and you will see your newly installed plugin ready to setup. Simply tick the boxes you wish (you can enable such things as twitter cards, google author info and much more.
So What Does It do?
Ok lets take our Tides demo site as and example, by default, when you share the homepage via Facebook, this is the information picked up from the page.
Its not bad, but its rather generic and may not really represent the page in the way you want. So, using the above plugin we can assign our own image, independently to the featured image/and images within the pages content
So, when a user shares the page, they see our jazzy custom image instead!
But what if you want to take things further and customise the text? No problem, the ever-fantastic Yeost SEO plugin can come to the rescue.
Once you have installed Yoast SEO, simply head to Pages in your WP admin area and navigate to your homepage. Below the main content area you will see this new area where you can alter the title/description of your page with ease.
The final result can be seen here. As you can see its much more focussed and customized to our needs.
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