Excerpts when auto-sharing posts to Facebook pages
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This is not related to Facebook images when posts are shared. (When searching previous posts for a similar topic, everyone’s issues seemed to stem around what image got used on Facebook when a post was shared. I don’t care about the image.)
I have my WordPress blog auto-sharing each published post onto my Facebook page. However, the excerpt used when sharing to Facebook is just the first 100 (or so) words from the post itself, rather than my selected excerpt created during my drafting process.
Because of this, my most recent post shared an excerpt that looked like this on Facebook:
Full Title: No Plot? No Problem! A Low-Stress, High-Velocity Guide to Writing a Novel in 30 Days Author: Chris Baty, Founder of National Novel Writing Month Published: September 2004 by Chronicle Books (apparently I got a used first edition) Genres: Nonfiction, Writing & Books, Authorship, Writing Skills, Writing Fiction Edition Details: 176 pages, trade paperback Source: {Purchased – Used} [ 628 more words ]
It’s ugly, because it’s pulling from the information I include at the beginning of a book review. The excerpt I chose was a paragraph from the review itself. I know that, at least once upon a time, your excerpt created during your drafting process was the excerpt used on sites that you auto-share your posts into. Is there a way to update that again, or a setting to ensure that I don’t get gibberish text blobs as post descriptions when sharing to Facebook?
The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)
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I will add that I’ve reviewed the Publicize page for support, and it says that the excerpt under my sharing options (“The following text will be shared along with a link to your post:”) is what will post on sites like Facebook.
But it’s not. Because the same post listed in my previous example only had the blog post title in this field. I double-checked to be sure.
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Hi larissaleescribbles,
I tested manually sharing your latest post and the excerpt is showing on Facebook. You can see that in this screenshot:
https://cloudup.com/cckkMth2KSy
I noticed a number of other pages also have excerpts. Is Resource Review: “Breathing In, Breathing Out” by Ralph Fletcher the only post where this has happened?
I’ll do some further testing and let you know what I find.
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I’ve been looking into this and have been able to replicate what you are describing. The excerpt is only displayed when sharing a post on Facebook by entering the URL manually or using the sharing buttons — but not when a draft post is published and shared via Publicize. This looks like a bug so I’m going to create a bug report for our developers to look at.
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Hey there, good to see you already started this topic Larissa. I’m having the same issue..
Auto share option selected in WordPress and when shared in Facebook Page it ignored my Excerpt content and formatting and just added the blog post without any text formatting to the status update box.
Thank you for looking into this Gemma.
Rúben -
I’ve noticed that my most recent post (today) managed to just share with the post’s title, rather than a blog of unformatted text from the post itself. It’s still ignoring the excerpt, but that’s a smidge better than the previous issue.
Still unresolved, but we’ll see what happens. Gemmacevans, thanks for putting in a bug report!
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