Publicize and Facebook – wrong featured image

When you share a post on Facebook, or when Jetpack Publicize publishes a post to your Facebook page, Facebook crawls the page and looks for Open Graph meta tags in the head to build a complete post preview (with an image, title, description, …).

Jetpack automatically creates these Open Graph Meta tags for you unless you already use another Open Graph plugin, in which case we let the other plugin handle things. Looking at your site, you seem to be using the Yoast SEO plugin to manage Open Graph Meta Tags on your site.

Yoast’s tags are correct, though, they’re inserted properly, and as you’ve experienced when forcing Facebook to fetch new information, Facebook is able to gather information from the tags and generate a good post preview.

The problem seems to happen beforehand. Since you use Publicize, Facebook’s crawler is most likely the first to access your site after a post is published. If it can’t gather information about the post then, it means that the site is either down, or too slow to load. This may happen if you use other plugins that are triggered on publication. If many plugins (including Jetpack) are triggered at the same time, and if your hosting plan offers limited resources, it is possible that your site is slow for a few minutes after you publish a post.

If that’s the case, I’d recommend that you review your list of active plugins, and deactivating any plugin that you don’t use and that may have an impact on publication.
You could also try to install a caching plugin and see if it helps.

I hope this clarifies things a bit.

Thanks, Jeremy. I’ll try to investigate if there’s something wrong on my side.

Things are very weird here. I did another experiment. It probably will not clarify things further (at least not right now), but I’ll post it anyway.

I published a post on WordPress and I used Publicize for Twitter only (I unchecked the Facebook box; these are the only two social networks I use). As always, the tweet was posted with no problems at all, with the correct featured image.

I waited a few minutes and then I went to share the post manually on Facebook. I was surprised – Facebook could not pull the featured image and not even the post title! The preview was showing the fallback image and a “Page not found” as the title. In fact, that is happening right now, and it’s been like 20 minutes since the post was actually published on the site.

Now, an important note (I think): that happens if I try to share the post with the shortlink used by Publicize (https://www.example.com/?p=X, X being the post ID). When I try to share the post with the long permalink, I can get the correct featured image and post title.

This is very weird. It’s like Facebook is having some problems to pull the right information when the shortlink is used.

To summarise:

1. When I use Publicize with Twitter and Facebook (shortlink is used in both cases):
Twitter: correct title, correct image
Facebook: correct title, wrong image (fallback)

2. When I use Publicize with Twitter only and, many minutes later, share the post manually on Facebook (shortlink is used in both cases):
Twitter: correct title, correct image
Facebook: wrong title (“Page not found”), wrong image (fallback)

3. When I use Publicize with Twitter only and, few minutes later, share the post manually on Facebook (long permalink is used on Facebook):
Twitter: correct title, correct image
Facebook: correct title, wrong image (no image at all, not even the fallback appears on the preview)

4. When I use Publicize with Twitter only and, a few more minutes later, share the post manually on Facebook (long permalink is used on Facebook):
Twitter: correct title, correct image
Facebook: correct title, correct image

Is it possible to set up Publicize to use the long permalink instead of the shortlink?

I would like to make some additional tests using the long permalink in Publicize.

Is it possible to set up Publicize to use the long permalink instead of the shortlink?

Try going to Jetpack > Settings in your dashboard, and activate the WP.me Shortlinks module. Publicize will then use long permalinks instead of shortlinks.

Thanks, Jeremy. Activating the WP.me shortlinks did make Publicize use the long permalinks.

I just published a new post using Publicize on both Twitter and Facebook. What I got is this:

Twitter: correct title, correct image
Facebook: correct title, wrong image (no image at all, not even the fallback appears on the preview)

Now, the weird thing. When, five minutes later, I try to share the same post on Facebook again, manually, I get no image and no title. I get nothing, as the debug shows: https://goo.gl/eNlA5y. This is especially weird because Publicize at least was able to get the correct title; I get nothing, and I’m trying to share five minutes after Publicize did.

After I press “Fetch new scrape information” a couple times more, I finally get the right results.

Five minutes should be enough time for Facebook to get all the meta tags. I’m actually under the impression that, if I didn’t press “Fetch new scrape information” a couple more times, I would keep getting nothing even a few hours later.

Anyway, something is probably very wrong on my side. Thanks for your support.

the debug shows: https://goo.gl/eNlA5y.

This does seem like an issue with Facebook Cawler, or Facebook Debug. Notice the “Time Scraped” value at the top of your screenshot? The time should match the last time Facebook crawled your post; in this case, it should be the time when you published the post, or the last time you hit the “Fetch new scrape information” button.

I’m not sure why that’s not working in your case. It might be worth letting Facebook know about it; they might be able to get this fixed for you.
https://developers.facebook.com/bugs/

When opening a new bug, I’d suggest adding as many screenshots as possible to explain your problem.

I hope this helps.

Just a quick update… It might be a coincidence only (I don’t remember seeing anything related to it in the changelog), but I published two posts after updating Jetpack, and Publicize worked on Facebook with no problems.

I also filed a bug on Facebook for Developers, as Jeremy suggested, but they gave it a “Won’t Fix” status.