Often, when advertising on Facebook, you will find that the easiest way to create an ad is to use an existing post on your Facebook page.

In fact, when creating the post, you will quite likely already have the intention of using it as an ad.

A very common example is when you want to share a blog post you have written.
Once you insert the link to your blog, Facebook will pull in the main image, title and description (or first line) to create a visually appealing post.

However, these elements might not always look as you expected and although it is likely straightforward to change them in your website, Facebook will have cached (saved) the original version so you will need to force it to update.
That’s where the Sharing Debugger comes in!

You can use the debugger both to preview how shared links will look and to force Facebook to ‘scrape’ the details again from your site.

You can access the debugger here: https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/

Video Transcription

Hey! This week I want to tell you about another tool that Facebook provides that can be very useful when creating your ads. This one is called ‘The Sharing Debugger’.

So you will use it when you want to share a link in a Facebook post that you’re going to use as an ad, or even if you just want to share a link that you’re not going to use as an ad. Either way, when you put a URL into a post, Facebook will straightaway populate and show you a preview of how it’s going to look.

But often you’ll see it and you’ll realise that it doesn’t look quite right. Maybe you want to change the image, for example. So then you’ll go to your website and you’ll change the image and go back to share again.

But Facebook won’t have updated what they have saved and it’ll be showing the original image. So to change that you go to the Facebook sharing debugger (you can just Google it or I’ll put a link below) and put in your URL and you can refresh what Facebook have saved.

So that’s my tip for this week. All the best, see you again next week!