This is the Wrong Image for this Place
It’s the wrong image for the Facebook Preview. The photo doesn’t attract attention. It’s stuffy. And, it doesn’t support the idea of a domain name. The text flattened into the image isn’t much help either. It’s the wrong image for this post in the context of Facebook.
It Is the Right Image for this Place
This is the right image for the context of displaying the topics (categories) covered by the Montana Webmaster website. On the home page, the focus isn’t specific posts about domain names, but linking to a sample articles in various categories. This plan allows the post for each category to be switched out while keeping the representative image.
For SEO (search engine optimazation), it is important to have new content displayed on the home page. But, the truth is that I often neglect to switch out which individual post is featured.
This Isn’t the Right Place for these Images Either
This is a page for a specific category. Each listing is a post summary, link and image. The title already says it’s the Business Topics category. I don’t have to describe the category, like I did on the home page. On this page, I need to explain each post, individually. Each article should have an image that communicates the topic of the specific article and gives the reader a reason to click to the article.
But, because the images represent categories, they are causing even more confusion by repeating on multiple posts.
If there is a problem, and someone passes along the order to fix it, don’t stop there. Does the fix actually fix it, or do you need to refine further? 
In the second screenshot here, there is a further problem. The screenshot of the chart explains one paragraph of the article, not the whole article.
The image of the chart is actually very close, but it has too much noise (clutter) because it doesn’t zoom in on the general topic, which is the charts provided by Google Trends.
Planning and Gathering Images for each Article
While it is possible that one image will communicate correctly in more than one place, it’s likely that your website article and social media posts may each need several representative images.
- The category image will represent topic of the whole set of posts.
- Your banner image is takes special consideration because a single article can be attached to multiple categories. Choosing a single banner image for a whole Category assumes that you can know what category your viewer will use to get the that post and also that you have software to choose the matching image for the category.
- A Featured Image. This is the image that should have been set correctly for each post on the screenshot of the 4 post previews above. Each one of those images should be specific to the article, and there should be no duplication to reduce confusion.
- Additional images that will be added to areas of the article to illustrate a point, and also to keep the viewer’s interest in the article.
A Facebook Preview Image that Communicates
The Facebook post shown in the first example is about losing your domain name. There are two main concepts that could be represented in the image: domain names and lost. “Lost” is much more compelling and easier to demonstrate in an image.
Besides the idea of finding the right image is avoiding an image that is not quite right. For example, here is an image that is about “find”, not about “lose”.