I use Jetpack Publicize to share my posts on Facebook and Twitter. This makes it easy to create a single WordPress post and have it show up on social media sites. Those services automatically use the Featured Image of the WordPress post, plus an excerpt of the title/text.

There’s another cool feature: Facebook and Twitter will include a photo and text summary for your site whenever someone types your URL into their post on Facebook and Twitter.

But… It can be tricky to figure out how Facebook/Twitter retrieve the image and the text. (I started this quest because Facebook was choosing the wrong image for the thumbnail. I found my first clue by reading WP Beginner’s article How to fix Facebook Incorrect Thumbnails.) This led to the debugging techniques below.

Both Facebook and Twitter use Open Graph metatags to find the desired image, text, title, etc.  Jetpack automatically sets these OpenGraph meta-tags: og:image tag, og:title, and og:description. It also automatically inserts tags for Twitter: twitter:text:title and twitter:description.

To see what those services will display, each has a Debugger/Validator. To use them, go to the page below and type in your URL.

Facebook Validator: https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/sharing/
Twitter Card Validator: https://cards-dev.twitter.com/validator

Problem:  Jetpack automatically sets the OpenGraph tags, but sometimes it chooses values that are not useful, and they cannot be modified within Jetpack. (At least, Jetpack support could not tell me how to set them.)

Update: Using Jetpack 7.3.1 and Yoast 11.3, the conflict between these two plugins appears to have gone away. But this note still describes useful debugging techniques for Facebook and Twitter. (31May2019)

Solution – Part 1: The Yoast SEO plugin – I use the free version – also lets you set the Open Graph tags for both Facebook and Twitter. (In addition, I really like how it helps to optimize my text for search engines.) However, Yoast and Jetpack’s Open Graph tags interfere with each other.

Solution – Part 2: This is a little bit yucky, but you can disable Jetpack’s OpenGraph tags with a bit of code in your child theme’s functions.php file, as described in Remove Jetpack’s Open Graph meta tags This is no longer required – see Update above.

TL;DR: (Too Long; Didn’t Read)

• Use Jetpack Publicize to share your posts on social media
• Use Yoast SEO to set the Open Graph tags for Twitter and Facebook
• Disable Jetpack’s Open Graph tag facility – Jetpack will still share the posts, but won’t add its own Open Graph meta-tags  This is no longer required – see Update above.