Let’s face it. Facebook and it’s annoying ban on selling live animals is frustrating. Everyone sells their horses on FB but no one admits it.
Build your horse for sale post
You’ll have exact directions in your site Help. Just look for Publishing Help toward the top of that big menu along the side in your Dashboard.
Take great photos
Yep, we say that all the time. And yes, decent photos are better than none. And yes, we’ll talk about horse photos a lot. But this step requires an additional photo at 1200 x 630. If you use the wrong size, or more specifically the wrong ratio, Facebook will crop it and of course you’ll have no control. Here’s some photos that I took, cropped for what seemed like excellent reasons and what FB would do to them. In other words, try to get one eye catching pic and upload in this ratio. Even if the one you use in your post is this same photo cropped differently, you’ll need one that is the 1.91 to 1 ratio. Yeah, just think 2 to 1, over 1200 pixels wide, and with some room on the edges for random-seeming cropping.
Don’t forget the Search and Social displays
You need to fill this section out on every post. Really, yeah it seems like a pain when you are trying to get a bunch of colts on your site late at night or early before work. But it’s how you influence what Google figures out about your page and how it displays it.
Importantly, this section is also how you can control the display on Facebook. And that’s necessary because FB doesn’t allow horse sales. Your FB post needs to drag people away from there so you can explain on your own site why the horse is for sale and give a price if you want to.
This screenshot shows how to find the Yoast SEO section of your Post Editor. It is a little hidden but not hard to find once you know how important it is. By the way, Yoast is the brand name of the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) plugin we use. There are other good ones out there and they should all allow you to do the same things.
Once you have that side panel showing, click on the “Search appearance” item. A modal will pop up – that just means a pop up box. It will let you suggest to Google what you think your page should look like to searchers. I say suggest because Google might decide to write it’s own description for you. That is frustrating but this is so important that we need to take the time to do it all as good as we can anyway.
Use your keywords. Keep an eye on the preview so you don’t use too many characters or words. You want keywords in both the SEO Title and the Meta Description. That helps Google figure out it should display your site. Then of course you want your preview to appeal to humans that want to buy a horse like yours. You have to make the photo and the text appealing to humans so they click!
Key point here! Do not change the Slug on his screen unless you really know what you are doing. Changing that actually changes the URL or address of the page. That is almost always a mistake from an SEO standpoint. I really wish they would let me disable that option.
Post your horse for sale to Facebook
Yay! Now comes the easy part. This is all about the prep and once it is done, this is easy.
Go to your Facebook Page. Make sure you are posting as your Page. Then all you have to do is Write an intro bit about the horse and paste in the link.
You’ll see the information you posted in the Yoast SEO section pulls up on the Facebook post. Slick, huh? Beats the mess Facebook can make when you let it choose!
Below the screenshot you’ll see a quick video of the process.