Nov 7, 2016

Social Media Savvy with @CyFairJoel: Changing a Headline on a Facebook Post



If you operate your school’s, team’s or program’s official Facebook page, you have likely gotten used to copying and pasting a link into your post and watching the Facebook genie magically create a nice-looking preview for your link—complete with the headline, thumbnail visual and first couple lines of text from the story.

If you aren’t already, make sure you’re deleting the URL from the body of the post after the preview pops up. Using the example below from our district Facebook page, I would want to ditch the http:// copy as it’s redundant and helps declutter my post.


But one other thing you may not know that can also declutter your posts is modifying the headline itself. Links posted from our cfisd.net website are a great example, because they automatically include the full site name in the preview headline: “Cypress-Fairbanks Independent School District ::” then the specific page title or headline.

This can be problematic as Facebook has character limits for these preview posts, and were my headline about the football playoffs a bit longer, it could have gotten cut off and left readers wondering what the point of the article was. To avoid such confusion and keep my posts clear and concise, I simply change the preview text of the headline itself.

This is a great feature that Facebook allows, and it’s easier than you might think. After you have pasted the link and the preview populates, simply hover your cursor over the headline text and watch it highlight yellow:


Once it does this, click on it and it becomes a text box you can manipulate. In some instances, your preview may say little to nothing at all and you want to help the reader understand exactly what they’re clicking. In this case, I simply want to delete the name of our school district from the front end of the text, like so:


Voila! Click “Post,” and you now have a clean-looking preview to present to your page subscribers:


Have another tip you think would be helpful? Hit me up!

~ @CyFairJoel

Having trouble with Twitter mentions? Check out last week's post!

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