How are link previews handled by the different social sites?
A link preview will generally be handled differently based on the social site you're posting to. Please see the list below for the relevant link preview information for different social sites and RSS Auto Posters.
How and when a link preview is displayed on Facebook largely depends on the settings you've selected when setting up or editing a Facebook social profile.
If you set the “Post as full-sized image” option to “No”, it will post the link preview as normal.
If you set the “Post as full-sized image” option to “Yes”, and the link preview is automatically generated, then it will treat the link preview as an image. Also, links will no longer be stripped from the message as this would remove information from the message which would have been in the link preview.
If the “Automatically generate link previews” option is set to “Yes” but a message has no photos or videos attached, the program will search for links in the body (text) of the post. It will then pull metadata (e.g. title, description and image) for the first link it comes across.
For more information on Facebook Page profile settings, please see this page.
To edit link previews, you need to verify your domain on Facebook Business Manager and assign the domain to specific Facebook pages. For more information on editing link previews, please view this page.
Twitter doesn't currently support link previews in the same way that Facebook does.
Twitter's version of Open Graph metadata is called a 'Twitter Card'. Currently, Twitter Cards will only be displayed in a post if the webpage you're linking to has Twitter Card information coded on the site itself, which tells Twitter to display a Twitter Card.
The following page provides more information about Twitter Cards:
This means that we currently have no control over Twitter Cards and when they are or are not displayed however, we are hoping that Twitter will give third parties like Sendible access to Twitter Cards in future.
The only option we can currently provide which is similar is for images to automatically be pulled from links and for this to be included in your Twitter post.
If the “How link previews should be posted” option on the Twitter posting profile your posting to is set to “Ignore images”, then Twitter will just ignore the link preview.
If the “How link previews should be posted” option is set to “Post with images”, then Twitter will post the image as long as this will not truncate (replace part of the text with '...' so it is not more than 140 characters) the message text.
For more information on setting up Twitter posting profiles, please see this page.
The image should be available on the page you're linking to, as LinkedIn ignores link preview information sent by third parties like Sendible. Therefore, creating a link preview from an image or similar will not work in this case.
If you'd like to confirm what image and information will be pulled and displayed by LinkedIn for the URL you're posting, you can do so by checking their Post-Inspector here:
RSS Auto Poster
Link previews can be included on messages being automatically pulled from RSS feeds and posted out via an RSS Auto Poster when the option “Post the following content” is set to “Title, Link and Image”, "Title, Description, Link and Image', or 'Description, Link and Image' on the RSS Auto Poster profile settings.
In this case, our system will try to locate the image by initially searching for the OpenGraph image based on this protocol: http://ogp.me and then defaulting to the first image it finds on the web page the link goes to.
Image information can still be pulled if OpenGraph information is not set on the page you're linking to, but if you are the owner of the site, we would recommend adding OpenGraph information, if you haven't already, as this not only helps in this case but OpenGraph information is accepted by the majority of social sites including Facebook meaning you can control what information is being displayed in a link preview, even if the person posting is not doing this via Sendible or another third-party service.
For more information on RSS Feeds and RSS Auto-poster settings, please see this page.