How to Get Your Thumbnails to Show on Social Sites

Here is the scenario: You create some great content. The content gets submitted by someone other than yourself to one of the many social sites. The thumbnail that is picked to correspond with the piece is totally irrelevant to the content and is damaging the content’s momentum to move forward. How do you fix this?

Thumbnails are adopted more and more by sites to offer a visual addition to the text links. We could see them on Twitter soon, Reddit began to adopt this method not too long ago, and some SERP’s use them as well. Sometimes a site automatically generates a thumbnail from nearby pages or posts to use. Other sites offer the submitter a choice. One of the images may be the one that works best and the other could be very off the mark. Let’s look into how we can make this more controlled by you the content creator.

A solution to make the process more controlled would be creating a smaller consumable image that is close to the top of the page/content. This image should be in a more or less square format, like the image below the header in the beginning of this post. Applications like iTag work by embedding titles, descriptions and keywords into your movies and photos.

Media RSS, MRSS:

Multimedia-related syndication of podcasts and videos acts just like RSS but allows syndication of various multimedia files, images and video files right inside an RSS feed. By adding the MRSS extensions to your RSS feed, you can deliver multimedia content to your audience. Submitting is easy and is being integrated into a number of search engines.

“RSS syndication is a simple and inexpensive way to build awareness of your content and your brand and it’s also a great way to drive traffic to your site and content.” -from Yahoo! Media RSS syndication FAQ

Digg:

When I submitted a ‘picture’ to Digg I was offered several thumbnails to choice from.

One of them was the picture, the others were not. If I picked the wrong one it would be conflicting and weird.

Reddit:

This happens automatically with Reddit picture or video submissions.

StumbleUpon:

Submissions automatically generate a thumbnail that can be viewed in the favorites section of users, and if a page does not have an appropriate image, the whole page will show up as the thumbnail. Check out the article on Polaroids that was stumbled — no image, but the whole screen shows up.

Facebook:

When you share a link you have the option to choose what thumbnail will be shown, or no thumbnail at all, with the short caption and link. Just like Digg, some of these options will be irrelevant to the content, so pick the right one and avoid confusing people.

Picking an appropriate thumbnail to go along with your social media site submission is an integral part of the process. If you choose the the wrong thumb it will confuse viewers. Remember, a picture is worth a thousand words!