How to Make Your Video Blog Posts Facebook Friendly

Lots of people like you and me post blogs containing a youtube video, but did you know that you might be missing out on a big potential source of traffic to your blog post?

Studies have shown that facebook posts containing an image are up to 3 times more likely to get clicked than posts that just contain a link.

Knowing that, it totally makes sense that you would want all of your blog posts to have a good image show up when someone shares it on facebook.

Stand out with WordPress Featured Images

For most modern wordpress themes (including the Genesis Theme Framework) this means that you need to assign a featured image to your post. If you don’t know about the featured image, you aren’t alone. It was introduced in wordpress 2.9, so it’s been around for almost 3 years now, but a lot of people still don’t know about it or understand how it works.

Featured images commonly do these things:

Show up on blog listing pages.
Show up in Sliders that display featured blog posts.
Show up in featured blog post areas as a thumbnail.
Show up as the thumbnail that gets shared to Facebook.

Step by Step

Here’s a step by step tutorial on how to get the youtube video screenshot into your blog post as a featured image.

Go to the youtube video that you have just embedded into your blog post.
Right click on a blank area of the video page and select view source.
Find the line in the source code that says og:image. This is the line that tells facebook what image should be used for sharing.
Grab the image url that ends in mqdefault.jpg, and paste it into the address window. (If you want a higher resolution image, you can replace the m with an h in the name so that the filename is hqdefault.jpg).
Right click on the image, and save image as.
Give it a search engine friendly name such as your-keyword-phrase.png
Then inside of the blog post go to featured image on the right hand side and select add featured image.
Find the image that you saved from youtube, and select it.
When it has uploaded, scroll down to the bottom and click use as featured image.
After doing this, the image has been assigned as the featured image and you can click update or publish to update the blog post with this featured image.