I’m having trouble with Facebook not displaying thumbnails when I share links to my website. The page I’m trying to share contains an embedded YouTube video but when I post the link to Facebook, only plain text appears without any preview image.
The website URL I’m sharing is: https://www.mysite.com/content/Amazing_Video_Content.html
I expected Facebook to automatically generate a preview with the video thumbnail, but instead it just shows the bare URL. This happens every time I try to share pages from my site that have embedded YouTube content.
I’m not sure what’s causing this problem. Do I need to add special meta tags to my HTML? Is there something specific Facebook requires for pages with embedded videos? I’ve seen other websites that show nice previews when shared, so I know it’s possible.
Any guidance on how to fix this would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!
YouTube embeds don’t automatically create Facebook previews. I fixed this by ditching YouTube’s thumbnail URLs and hosting my own custom image instead. Facebook often can’t fetch images from YouTube’s CDN properly. I upload a 1200x630 image to my server and link it in the og:image tag. You get way more control over how your content looks when shared. Also throw in og:type set to ‘video.other’ so Facebook knows it’s video content. Self-hosted thumbnails plus proper meta tags completely solved my preview problems.
I encountered a similar issue with my own website a while back. The problem stems from Facebook not recognizing embedded videos for generating link previews. It’s crucial to include Open Graph meta tags in the HTML of your pages. Specifically, you should add tags like og:image, og:title, og:description, and og:url to allow Facebook’s crawler to fetch the relevant preview information. For the og:image tag, consider using a high-quality thumbnail from your YouTube video, ideally sized at 1200x630 pixels. After implementing these changes, you can use Facebook’s Sharing Debugger to test the link and refresh their cache. This should resolve the preview issue effectively.
had this exact problem last month. facebook’s cache can be stubborn even after adding OG tags. clear your browser cache first, then hit the FB debugger tool multiple times - sometimes takes 3-4 tries before it picks up the new metadata properly.
Facebook’s super picky about this. Their bot doesn’t always crawl your site right away after you add meta tags. Use Facebook’s debugger tool to force a refresh - just paste your URL and hit ‘scrape again.’ Also, make sure your og:image uses https, not http. That trips up tons of people.
I’ve encountered this issue frequently as well. Facebook requires specific meta tags for generating link previews, and it can be challenging with embedded YouTube videos since they do not automatically pull the video thumbnail. You will need to manually include the og:image meta tag with the appropriate YouTube thumbnail URL in your HTML. Use the format https://img.youtube.com/vi/VIDEO_ID/maxresdefault.jpg, replacing VIDEO_ID with your actual video ID. Additionally, ensure you include the og:title and og:description tags. After adding these, utilize Facebook’s debugger tool to refresh their cache. This has worked for me consistently.