Beautiful Facebook Images When Sharing An Episode Of Your Flash Briefing

Thanks to Jeffrey St. Laurent of SellingCoaching.com for bringing this issue to my attention and helping me find a solution.

As many of you know, I love the quality of all the big podcast hosts (and most of the smaller ones too). It’s amazing that we have so many companies providing such great service to the podcast community. As a result, we have Alexa Guy clients using Libsyn, Blubrry, Podbean, Pippa, SoundCloud and others to host their audio files with no issues.

But for new clients who haven’t podcasted before, I usually recommend Podbean because of their ease of use, clear (and beautiful) interface and social media integrations (Full disclosure: I have an affiliate relationship with Podbean).

Yesterday, I was working with Jeff St. Laurent on his Flash Briefing, Selling Coaching Minute with Jeffrey St.  Laurent. He noticed that Podbean was using his square show cover art as the default image when sharing to Facebook. As a result, it was cropping off the top and bottom, which didn’t look good at all.

We can’t change the default image because iTunes, Google Podcasts, Spotify, etc. need that square image. So how can we change the image for sharing on social media only, but keep iTunes happy?

After a bit of tinkering, we found the answer: Change each episode’s default image. iTunes and the other outlets pull the default image in your RSS feed, but you can also add an image to each episode. So we created a default episode image that was in Facebook’s preferred 1200×630 resolution that looks like this:

Now, Jeff will just add it to each individual episodes when publishing (and if you’re good at graphic design, you can create a different episode image for each day, but one high-quality default image will work fine for most folks).

Here’s how it looks now when he shares to Facebook…

If you’re not seeing the image change, be sure to clear your browser cache and try going to Facebook’s debugger at https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug to clear the image Facebook has cached for that episode. Just paste your episode URL in the form field and click “Debug.” This should bring up the correct image and you’ll need to repeat this step for each of your episodes.

Note that your Alexa Guy team is happy to create this widescreen image for you, configure it for you in either Libsyn or Podbean and run Facebook Debugger on all of your previous episodes for $100. If you’d like this service, just click here.

Fixing this is Libsyn

Libsyn makes this job much easier because when sharing an episode to Facebook, it shrinks the square cover art and adds the show information to the side of it as in Louise Courville’s Girl Boss Coaches below.

Libsyn also lets you upload a default widescreen image, which will be served to YouTube instead of the square cover art. So if you haven’t set up a default widescreen image, take this opportunity to that.

Just create your widescreen image at 1400×788 and upload it in your show settings, directly below the default cover art.

Once again, you’ll probably need to go to Facebook debugger to update all the previous episodes.

Note that your Alexa Guy team is happy to create this widescreen image for you, configure it for you in either Libsyn or Podbean and run Facebook Debugger on all of your previous episodes for $100. If you’d like this service, just click here.

If you’re using Blubrry

Blubrry makes it even easier because it doesn’t show images in its Facebook previews, choosing instead to simply show a description of the episode.

There you have it. Flash Briefings are still so new that we’re all learning something every day. If you have any questions about this or anything else regarding your Flash Briefing, please don’t hesitate to contact me or schedule a time to chat.