Blog.

Article topics

Getting new website preview images on social media

matt-willson

(updated Feb ’22)

You’ve got a new website you want to share with your connections on LinkedIn; you’ve started a new marketing campaign that’s likely to get traction on Facebook.

In anticipation, because you know what you’re doing on social media, you’ve also updated your “og:image” and “og-description” – the two open graph tags that tell social media how to preview your website:

<meta property=”og:title” content=”What social media shows as the title of your website”/>

<meta property=”og:description” content=”What social media shows as the preview text for your website” />

<meta property=”og:image” content=”http://example.com/social/preview.jpg” />

(Want to know what size images to use for social media – see our article here)

Yet there’s a problem – you’ve been to Facebook and LinkedIn, put your web address in the status box, but the preview information of your website hasn’t updated.

Why not? It’s because social media sites cache information – they store it themselves, rather than load it in afresh every time it’s requested. It’s one of the reasons – apart from huge servers – that these sites are still very fast loading.

So you need to find a way to update social media preview information.

With Facebook it’s relatively easy – use their Open Graph Debugger Tool – put your URL in the box and hit Debug – you may need to do it a couple of times, but you’ll see your new Open Graph information.

open-graph-debugger

LinkedIn

LinkedIn has a similar tool to Facebook here: https://www.linkedin.com/post-inspector/

Twitter

And likewise, Twitter has a tool that does it, too: https://cards-dev.twitter.com/validator