Prevent shared posts on Facebook displaying first few paragraphs

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  matthewburgesswales · Member · Oct 28, 2019 at 6:05 pm

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  Just wondering if anyone can help me with this, I’ve had a look at my publicise settings and can’t find anything which might change it.

  Basically, when a post is automatically shared onto Facebook it shows the post title and image, but also includes something like the first 200 words of the post itself, following be an indication of how many more words of the post are remaining.

  I just want Facebook to show the post title and image. I don’t want Facebook to include the first few paragraphs. Can I change this??

  Thanks in advance to any replies.

  The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)

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  kokkieh · Staff · Oct 29, 2019 at 5:47 am

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  Hi there,

  I just want Facebook to show the post title and image.

  That’s not possible.

  All Publicize sends is the link, and the custom description if you specified one, which is posted the same way you’d manually post a status update on Facebook. Facebook then checks your post to look for an image and preview text, which it uses for the preview. So the preview is generated on Facebook’s end, and they control what shows in it. It’s not something we actively send to them.

  If you set a custom excerpt for your post in the editor we suggest to Facebook that they use that instead of the first 180 words (what they use by default), but the final decision lies with their system and we have no direct control over it.

  Likewise we suggest that they use the post’s featured image, but if their algorithms think a different image will work better, we have no way to prevent them using that image.