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Why do link previews appear differently on Facebook or Twitter?

Sendible uses Facebook's Open Graph Protocol tags to generate link previews. If the link preview looks different on Facebook or Twitter there could be few reasons for this. To help you troubleshoot these, please see below:

Facebook has out of date link preview data

This can be the cause is most issues, due to the fact that Facebook keeps a cache of the link previews it may sometimes keep a wrong copy of them.

To fix this: You can force Facebook servers to "re-scrape" (refresh) the link preview which would update their current version. Please use Facebook's Sharing Debugger to do this.

  1. Enter the URL you're having link preview issues with and click Debug FB___Twitter_Link_Preview_Debug___2_2.png
    Note: The full URL needs to be used and not the shortened URL
  2. Scroll down to Time Scrapped and click the Scrape Again button to refresh Facebook's copy FB__Twitter_Link_Preview_Scrape_2.2.png
  3. Go back to Sendible and repost the message.

Duplicate or no Open Graph tags in the source code

The best practise is to have at least one Open Graph tag within the source code, please look at your URL's source code and search for how many og:image tags there are.

To do this, simply right click on the page in question and select "View Page Source". Then click Ctrl + F (for Windows) or Cmd + F (for Mac) and searching for how many times og:image appears, if any or at least it should be just once.

Tip: In some cases, this could be from using two WordPress SEO plugins. Please ensure you are only using one plugin to manage your Open Graph tags.

The link preview looks different on Twitter

Another thing to bear in mind is to ensure that the Open Graph information, which includes the image, is the same as the Twitter Card. To check this simply right click on the page in question and select "View page source". From here you can compare all the og: tags with the twitter:card tags.FB___Twitter_Link_Preview_open_graph_1.png

Alternatively, you can use Twitter's validator by adding the URL for the page you're linking to here:

https://cards-dev.twitter.com/validator

Still an issue?

No worries! We'll take over from here.

Please submit a support ticket and be sure you mention that you have taken these three troubleshooting steps. If you can provide screenshots of the issue and the steps you took to replicate the issue, even better!

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