Twitter has starting displaying incorrect thumbnail when sharing posts

  • Unknown's avatar
    nlgbbbblth · Member ·

    Hi all,

    My WordPress posts are album reviews consisting of two images (front cover and back cover) and then paragraphs of text. I have been sharing them on Twitter for many years. Over the last couple of weeks, I have noticed that when I share the post on Twitter, the second image is now displayed as the thumbnail – i.e. the back cover which isn’t as aesthetically pleasing as the front cover. This was never an issue before.

    I have tested sharing the posts on Facebook and there is no problem – the post displays the correct first thumbnail.

    Any suggestions on how to fix this would be appreciated. Thank you.

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

  • kokkieh · Staff ·

    Hi there,

    Is this happening for posts you share automatically via Publicize, or posts you share manually by using the Twitter button on your posts or pasting the link directly into Twitter?

    Can you give a link to a post, and to a corresponding tweet, where it’s using the wrong image?

  • Unknown's avatar
    nlgbbbblth · Member ·

    Hi,
    Thanks for response

    This happens when I manually share by using the Twitter button under the WordPress post. I have tried pasting the link into Twitter and the same outcome occurs in both instances – second image displayed as thumbnail.

    Link to post

    Ruby Trax: The NME’s Roaring Forty (NME, 1992)

    Link to tweet

    Thanks

  • kokkieh · Staff ·

    Okay. It’s sharing that image, because that’s the image indicated in your site’s HTML headers as the image for that post. I suspected it might be a caching issue on Twitter’s end, but that’s not the case here.

    When you publish a post, our system automatically checks the post for images suitable to be used in social media previews and rich search results. Usually it will use the first image in the post, but in this case it appears our system thinks the second image is more suitable, likely because of the two, that’s the slightly bigger image in the post (just a one-pixel width difference, but apparently that matters :) )

    The only way to control which image is used, is to set the one you want as the featured image for the post as well. I don’t think your theme displays featured images, so it shouldn’t affect how your site looks if you set those on your posts, while letting you control which image gets shared to social media.

  • Unknown's avatar
    nlgbbbblth · Member ·

    Ok – that makes sense ; will check the featured image and ensure it’s the one I want. I appreciate your help, thank you very much.

  • kokkieh · Staff ·

    You’re very welcome :)

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