How do I make sure my social sharing image displays properly?

Learn about best practices to keep in mind when choosing a social sharing image to make sure it displays properly.

Posting your landing page URL to a social media platform is a great way to drive subscriber growth. You can specify an image that you'd like to be used as the default when posting your link to a social media site, but sometimes this image might be cropped, or displayed in a way that you don't want.

How will my image be displayed?

Images are displayed based on the specifications of the social media platform that you're posting your landing page URL to. While those specifications may vary from platform to platform, there are a few image best practices that you can keep in mind while picking your image. 

• Minimum dimensions for an image are 200 x 200 pixels.
• Size of the image file must not exceed 8 MB.
• At minimum, use an image that is 600 x 315 pixels to display as a larger image. 
• Images smaller than 600 x 315 pixels will be displayed, smaller than the original.
• Image aspect ratios as close to 1.91:1 will avoid unwanted cropping. 

Why was my Social Sharing Image not displayed?

Specifically when posting your landing page URL to Facebook, you may see your image altered in some way. When content is shared for the first time, the Facebook crawler, which identifies the image, will scrape and cache the metadata from the shared URL. The crawler has to see an image at least once before it can be displayed. This means that the first time you share a link to your Facebook page, you won't see an image displayed. So you might not see the image, but everyone else likely will.

Similarly, you might find that after updating your Social Sharing Image within your AWeber landing page and posting the URL to your Facebook page, the older image will still be used. This is because Facebook will reuse the initial image that was cached for some period of time before refreshing it. 

Please Note: LinkedIn will cache images, titles, and descriptions for 7 days. This can cause older content to display when publishing a landing Page to LinkedIn. This article on LinkedIn will provide instructions on how you can reset the cache manually.

How can I prevent my image from displaying incorrectly?

In order to prevent this from happening, you can use Facebook's Sharing Debugger to pre-cache the image. Run the URL through the URL debugger to pre-fetch metadata for the page. This can also be used to update the image for a piece of content. LinkedIn uses a similar caching function, you can find their Post Inspector will resolve this issue.

To see how your shares might display on other platforms, SocialSharePreview.com is another excellent tool to preview your images with.

With optimized images you'll get more exposure for your posts and see your subscriber audience grow as a result.