This tutorial will guide you through the steps to change the image that displays on Facebook when you link to your church website. 


Problem: When you type in your church website address into Facebook to post a link, Facebook picks an image that may or may not be what you want to represent your church. Here is an example:




As you can see, that image doesn't best represent the church. Fortunately, we have a fix so you can upload your church logo or image of your choosing.


DISCLAIMER: This tutorial will guide you through the steps of using a 3rd party plugin to update your thumbnail on Facebook. This tutorial is to aid in this process, we do not offer any further support other than this tutorial.

Please be sure to follow the directions exactly as they are written. Failure to input the proper information can cause your website to not appear correctly on desktop and/or mobile views. If you experience a problem with the view of your website after following these steps, please review them again, if you are not able to resolve the issue disable the plugin and see if your website appears correctly. 


Solution:

1.  Log into your church website.

*the next steps will guide you through uploading your image to the media folder, if you already have your image uploaded skip to step 5*

2. Click Advanced


3.  Hover over Media and click on Add New 
4.  Upload your image
Now we need to get the url for your image

5.  Select your image

6.  On the right side next to URL copy that ENTIRE address 

*hint: you can select the entire address my triple left click of the mouse, then right click and select copy


7.  Click the "X" to close that window

8. Click Plugins > Add New
9. In the Search Plugins field type Head10. On the Head Meta Data plugin click Install Now




Sit tight while the plugin installs, the page will automatically refresh once the install is complete.
11.  Click Activate Plugin
12.  Under the Advanced Section click Media13.  Click Plugins  
14. Go to Settings under the Head Meta Data plugin



15.  Click Options
16.  In the Include Custom Conent? Insert the following text:

<meta property="og:image" content="http://www.YourUrlHere.com/YourImagePath/YourImageName.jpg" />





17.  Now, in between the quotations you will replace http://www.YourUrlHere.com/YourImagePath/YourImageName.jpg with your image URL. If you don't still have your url saved, you can click "Save Settings" then navigate back to media and copy your image. Then return to the Head Meta Data settings and replace the example image url. 


*NOTE* If you would also like to change the text that appears underneath the picture in facebook, please add the following line below the previous text <meta property="og:description" content="content description" /> Replace content description with the text you would like displayed.


18. You can change the other meta tags if you would like. By default they are automatically pulled from existing data.

19.  Click Save Settings


That's it. Now, it can take up to 48 hours for Facebook to update their records. With the following steps you can potentially speed up that process.



2.  Type in your church website address, and click Show existing scrape data information

3.  Now if you scroll down to "When shared, this is what will be included" you will see the old image there:


4. Scroll back to the top of the page and click Fetch New Scrape Information

5.  Now it can take a little while for the section "When shared, this is what will be included" to be updated. But just above that in the section "Based on the raw tags, we constructed the following Open Graph properties" you should see your image under og:image


Now you should be able to go to your Facebook and post a link to the church and have the correct image display. 




If you need further assistance please submit a ticket through the Sharefaith Support Page, one of our Member Coaches would be happy to help!


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