How do I get my Wordpress video posts to include a thumbnail when shared on Facebook?

May 16, 2011 9:52 PM

When I share one of my wordpress blog posts on Facebook (via status update), how can I get it to pull a thumbnail from the youtube video embedded in the post?

I'm looking for a simple, automated way (preferably via Wordpress plugin) to make my shared posts look more interesting on Facebook. As it stands, when I drop in something like this:

http://dylancampbell.com/blog/?p=138

it ends up with just plain text. Ideally, I would like it to autopopulate the thumbnail as it does when I share a youtube URL.

posted by dcams to Computers & Internet (3 answers total)

You might want to look at the Wordpress plugin Wordbooker, which will autopost (and you can suppress) to Facebook. I think it does what you want.
posted by mephron at 9:57 PM on May 16, 2011 [1 favorite]

The thing you need to feed to Facebook is code which defines a thumbnail for the post using the [meta property="og:image" content="http://example.com/path/to/thumbnail.jpg" /] - so for your videos, you need appropriate thumbnails to get put into the Open Graph metadata.
posted by artlung at 10:03 AM on May 17, 2011

I have a video blog, and also a Facebook fan page for it. I had originally tried the "import notes" feature on Facebook to get my posts from the RSS feed, but like you, found that it didn't include the YouTube videos. I ended up using a WordPress plugin called "Add Link to Facebook." It still doesn't embed the video, but it creates a link to the original post, so that when my followers see the link in their news feed, they can click it to be taken to the original post at my site.
posted by LaurenIpsum at 6:58 AM on May 22, 2011