How to force an image in Facebook status update

It can be extremely frustrating sharing your web page or blog post to your Facebook wall or fan page and have Facebook pull in the wrong images. For example, when you or someone else posts a Facebook status update that includes a link to your blog post, you are presented with a box where you can enter a link to your post and text about your post. Oftentimes the images Facebook pulls in to choose from are not the images you may want to represent that post.

image in facebook status update

The image that is displayed is very important for branding and helps define that post which can bring more clicks. The good news is it’s extremely simple to force an image in Facebook status updates using the image_src meta tag.  Following is an example of how the image_src meta tag is used.
<link rel=”image_src” href=”http://www.url-to-your-image/image1.jpg” / >
This needs to be placed in between the <head></head> tags in your html. For example, in our Facebook applications page we placed the following 3 images in our head tags like below.
<head>
<link rel=”image_src” href=”http://faceitpages.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/facebook-applications.jpg” / >
<link rel=”image_src” href=”http://www.faceitpages.com/images/email-opt-in-forms.jpg” / >
<link rel=”image_src” href=”http://faceitpages.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/2-facebook-html-app.jpg” / >
</head>
Facebook will now display these 3 images to choose from as the available images in the Facebook status update. This will also control the image in Facebook comments when people add a link to your post in a comment. You are able to add as many image_src meta tags to the header as you would like but we recommend sticking with 2 to 4 really good ones that represent your post.

Dealing With Facebook Cache

Another annoyance is if you previously created the post without the image_src tags, Facebook may pull in a cached version of your page with the incorrect images. There is also an easy solution to this. You simply need to force Facebook to update its cache for your page. The easiest way to accomplish this is to run your url through the Facebook URL Debugger. After you run your url through the debugger, the cached version will be gone and Facebook will start pulling in your latest images in Facebook status updates and comments.

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