How to update site previews on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter

2 minutes

Aims of the lesson

When you create a page or article on your website, you should have a title, description and a preview image uploaded for social media. Once a link to that page is posted on a social network, such as Facebook, Linkedin or Twitter, then that platform will scan it and remember the information associated with that link.

But what if you change the details on the page or post later? If you change the title of the page, or even the description and image, then social networks won't immediately recognise it. This means that if anyone re-shares the link, the original page details will be displayed. 

This problem resolves itself after a few days on the social network end, which updates the data itself. But if you don't want to wait, you can use the manual update on each of the social networks.

Facebook 

In the Facebook debuger, you simply fill in the URL of the page, click the "Debug" button, and then click the "Scrape again" button.

LinkedIn 

Go to the Post inspector page, fill in the URL and click on the "Inspect" button.

Twitter 

Open the Card Validator web page, which will check and verify your URL. After filling it in, click on the "Preview card" button.

All these services make it easy to keep your social media content up to date.