Brand your blog’s feature images for social media

Today we’re going to offer you a really quick tip to help with your website’s marketing and your brand awareness – branding your feature images for social media.

Everyone should know the importance of writing content for your website. Content is what powers Google, it’s what Google is looking for and it’s what brings search traffic to websites. It’s the lifeblood of a website.

Social media, such as Twitter and Facebook, allows your content to be shared by others and allows wider exposure for your blogs, bringing more visitors to your website. All of this is pretty well known, and we won’t harp on about the benefits of content or of sharing your content via social media. No, we’re interested in improving branding.

If you’ve correctly set up Twitter Cards and Facebook Open Graph on your website, your blog’s feature image (or the main image from your website’s blog) will be pulled through by Twitter and Facebook and displayed in the tweet and Facebook post.

Here’s an example of how that looks:

How to receive messages to your Twitter and Facebook direct from your website https://t.co/a0ZL53MTqn

— Online Learning Acad (@OLAlearning) September 2, 2016

You’ll see that the Twitter Card is used, showing the feature image from the blog post, the title of the blog, a short description and a link. All of this is additional to the tweet itself. Whenever anyone links to your blog post, all of that data will be pulled through. However, other than the website link, it’s unbranded. Wouldn’t it be great if, every time someone linked to you on Twitter, your company branding was displayed on the tweet?

The answer is alarmingly simple, and is something a lot of news agencies have started doing. By simply branding your own feature images, your company branding is then displayed on social media whenever your post is linked to. Look at our feature image for this post. It features a blue bar under the image, complete with our logo and company name. This may seem like excessive branding on our website, as any visitors already know they’re on our site. However, whenever our post is linked to on Twitter it now looks like this:

Be really clever with your Facebook marketing https://t.co/jj4cMalIuz

— Online Learning Acad (@OLAlearning) November 24, 2016

You can also see other companies doing this, such as The Guardian:

Collateral Beauty: how does Helen Mirren compare with film's great Grim Reapers? https://t.co/Agm5rXKMfn

— The Guardian (@guardian) December 14, 2016

This branding also works on Facebook, so long as you have correctly set up Facebook’s Open Graph with your website.

So, what are you waiting for? Brand your website’s social media mentions with your own logo! Share on X