Setting the Preview Image, Title and Description for Shared Links

When sharing a page, AddToAny passes the page URL and title to services, and many services will use that data. Some services, such as Facebook, use the shared URL only to scrape the page's HTML code for metadata. A few services offer tools for seeing exactly what data and media will be used for sharing.

To modify a page's preview image, description, and additional metadata for these services, you can provide meta tags in the HTML code of the page.

Implementing Meta Tags

You can implement meta tags in a number of ways. In content management systems such as WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla, a theme/template might allow you to modify a page's meta tags (description, preview image, etc.), otherwise you can typically find a plugin/module that implements meta tags.

If you are coding the meta tags into a page or a theme/template, add the following HTML code, for example, to the <head> section.

<meta property="og:title" content="Example Page">
<meta property="og:image" content="https://example.com/images/image.jpg">
<meta property="og:description" content="This is just an example page.">
<meta property="og:url" content="https://example.com/page.html">
<meta name="twitter:card" content="summary_large_image">

Facebook Share Troubleshooting

Input a page URL into Facebook's URL debugger to see what Facebook sees. "Fetch new scrape information" to have Facebook refresh their cache after making changes to your page.

See Facebook's guide to Open Graph meta tags and how they relate to Facebook sharing.

Twitter Cards

By default, Twitter uses the page title supplied by AddToAny, and AddToAny permits further customizing of tweets.

Richer tweets that include an image or video are called Twitter Cards. When tweeting a link that Twitter has approved for a Twitter Card, Twitter looks for proprietary meta tags on the shared page that are similar to (and commonly mixed with) Open Graph meta tags. Enter a page URL into Twitter's Card Validator to preview the page's Twitter Card and to refresh their cache after making changes to the page.

LinkedIn Share Troubleshooting

Input a page URL into LinkedIn's Post Inspector to see what LinkedIn sees, and to have LinkedIn refresh their cache after making changes to your page. LinkedIn automatically clears their cache on a weekly basis.