Social media optimization with Yoast SEO

Our Yoast SEO plugin handles optimizing your WordPress site for search engines, and we dare say it does that well! Most of it is technical and content optimization, but there’s more to SEO than on-page optimization. You need links pointing to your website; for that to happen, people need to talk about you and your site. Being active on social media is a great way to make that happen, and our plugin also helps you optimize your social media!

Learn more about using social media and other essential SEO skills by following the Yoast SEO Academy courses. Yoast SEO Premium gives you free access to our courses and SEO news videos which help you stay on top of the latest news in SEO!

Sharing your freshly written (or optimized) content on social media is important. It helps you stay in touch with your audience and update them on news about your business and related topics. But to get their attention, you need to optimize your social media posts before you share them.

In this article, I’ll explain how you can optimize your posts for Facebook and Twitter, and how our plugin can help you with that! There’s also a video on social media optimization with Yoast SEO. Lastly, I’ll briefly discuss Pinterest and the use of Rich Pins.

A note on Facebook embeds on your site

As of October 24, it is no longer possible to embed Facebook and Instagram posts on your WordPress site. Facebook changed the authorization process which makes it impossible for WordPress to natively support embedding at this moment. The oEmbed Plus plugin can reinstate this feature. Here’s a guide on how to do that.

Facebook

Over a decade ago, Facebook introduced OpenGraph to determine which elements of your page you want to show when someone shares that page. Facebook’s OpenGraph is used by several social networks and search engines, but obviously, the main reason for adding it is for Facebook itself. Facebook’s OpenGraph support is continuously evolving, but the basics are simple. With a few pieces of metadata, you declare:

• What type of content is this?
• What’s the locale?
• What’s the canonical URL of the page?
• What’s the name of the site and the title of the page?
• What’s the page about?
• Which image/images should be shown when this post or page is shared on Facebook?

Facebook preview in Yoast SEO

When you use Yoast SEO, most of the values above are filled out automatically based on your post’s data. It uses the locale of your site, the site’s name, your SEO title, the canonical, the meta description value, etc to fill out most of the required OpenGraph tags. You can see what your post will look like when you click on ‘Facebook preview’ in the Yoast SEO sidebar:

This preview tab also allows you to edit the way your Facebook post is shown when shared. Our plugin makes it possible to change your social image, title and description right there in your preview. This makes your social media optimization a lot quicker and easier, as you won’t have to leave your post to make these changes.

If you use the options for social media optimization in Yoast SEO, your Facebook post could look like this when you share the URL of a post or page:

So what do you need to do?

1. First of all, go to SEO → Social, the Account tab and fill in your social media accounts.
2. After that, go to SEO → Social, the Facebook tab and make sure OpenGraph is enabled.
3. Then, set a good default image under the Facebook settings. This image is used when you have a post or page that does not contain an image. It’s important to set this image to ensure that every post or page has an image when shared. Facebook is fairly forgiving with uploading images but 1200px by 630px should work well.
4. Lastly, follow the steps in this article to go to your personal WordPress profile and add a link to your Facebook profile, if you want to associate your Facebook profile with your content. If you do, be sure to also enable the ‘Follow’ functionality on Facebook.

You can complete all of these steps in a few minutes. After that, Yoast SEO takes all of the work out of your hands. However, it is important to remember that Facebook sometimes doesn’t immediately pick up changes. So if you want to “debug” how Facebook perceives your page, enter your URL in the Facebook Debugger and click the Debug button. If the preview that you see there isn’t the latest version, you can try the Scrape again button. But remember that it can take a while for Facebook to see your changes.

OpenGraph for Video Content

If you have video content, you would need to do more work, unless you’re using our Video SEO plugin. This plugin takes care of all the needed metadata and allows you to properly share your videos on Facebook.

Twitter

Twitter’s functionality is quite similar to Facebook’s. The name of this functionality is Twitter Cards. Twitter “falls back” on Facebook OpenGraph for several of these values, so we don’t have to include everything. But it still is quite a bit. We’re talking about:

• the type of content/type of card
• an image
• a description
• the Twitter account of the site/publisher
• the Twitter account of the author
• the “name” for the domain to show in a Twitter card

Twitter preview in Yoast SEO

As you might have seen in the screenshot of the Yoast SEO sidebar above, there’s also a Twitter preview tab. Simply click that tab to preview how your page is shown when it gets shared to Twitter. By default, the plugin uses the title, description and image that you enter in the Google preview. Of course, this tab allows you to change these for your Twitter post.

Here’s an example of what your Tweet could look like with all the required metadata our plugin helps you add:

So what do you need to do?

Make sure Twitter card meta data is enabled by going to SEO → Social and clicking on the Twitter tab. This leaves two values for you to fill out in the settings:

• The site Twitter account, which you can fill out on the SEO → Social page under the Account tab;
• The author Twitter account, which he/she can enter on their individual WordPress profile page.

Read more: How to use Twitter cards »

Do more with your social snippets in Yoast SEO Premium

See how Yoast SEO Premium can help you to optimize your social snippets in this screencast:

Without leaving the post editor, our social previews let you check how your social snippets will look on Facebook and Twitter when people share the link. This saves you lots of time switching between tabs and helps you increase the number of people visiting your site!

Try our new templates for social snippets

Do you spend a lot of time tweaking the preview appearance of each page or post? You’ll be glad to know that from version 16.5, the Yoast SEO Premium plugin also offers a great new feature: the ability to set default templates for your social snippets. With this powerful feature, you can design the ideal social appearance for all of your content and feel certain that the output will always look great to whoever is sharing it.

What about Pinterest?

Pinterest’s Rich Pins allow for OpenGraph markup as well. To create a rich pin you should add variables like product name, availability, price and currency to your page. As this is mainly interesting for products, we decided to add functionalities to create rich pins to our Yoast WooCommerce SEO plugin.

Keep reading: How to promote your products and earn money on Pinterest »

Conclusion

So go ahead and use Yoast SEO to optimize your social media! It isn’t very hard; it just takes a few minutes of your time, and you will reap the rewards immediately. As these social networks add new features, we’ll keep our plugin and this article up-to-date. So, be sure to update the Yoast SEO plugin regularly.

Read on: Social Media Strategy: where to begin? »

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