Social preview images. The things that show up below your tweet or post when you share a link (but not a photo or video) on most social sites. Accompanied by a title, description, and URL (usually), these little blocks of content are good to be aware of both how they work and how they’re set up on your site.

Before we jump in, let’s jam on how this looks and works.

Images vs Links
Pop quiz. What is the difference between clicking the image in this tweet:

"@skiwildmtn's new tagline is simple, it’s clever, and it’s the sign of a ski area that is truly (and creatively) embracing who they are instead of constantly trying to be something they’re not." https://t.co/5P8bOWnJYT

— Gregg Blanchard (@slopefillers) August 4, 2022

Versus clicking the image in this tweet:

The Winter 22/23 Campaign has now begun. @slopefillers #sameoldbrandnew pic.twitter.com/YwS90QQU83

— Wild Mountain (@skiwildmtn) August 3, 2022

It’s a similar image, but in the first tweet the image is a social preview image which means that if you click the image you’ll go to the URL in the tweet. But if you click the image in the second tweet? You’ll see a larger version of that image.

In other words, if you your goal is people viewing the image? Just sharing an image a great approach.

But if your goal is link clicks? You’ll want to make sure your social preview images are correctly setup.

And because you’re not the only one sharing links to your site, having these setup is a great way to control how these links look when other people share them and have a better chance of a big, glossy image showing up below their post instead of just a plain link.

Setup
You can check most of the boxes with open graph tags. These let you specify a number of different bits of info about the page including an image, title, type, and URL.

The other one I typically worry about are Twitter’s card tags.

Testing
How do you know what yours look like? Here are a few links to the validators/testing tools each platform provides.

• Twitter Card Validator
• Facebook Sharing Debugger
• LinkedIn Post Inspector
• Pinterest Rich Pin Validator

If your preview suck? Well, you’ve got a decision to make. Either pay your agency to buidl this code into the way your pages are built using the stuff in your CMS or just be patient and bring it up the next time you do a redesign.

Either way, you can fix what you aren’t aware of, so hopefully this little overview gives you something to dig into a little this fine Wednesday morning.

About Gregg & SlopeFillers
I've had more first-time visitors lately, so adding a quick "about" section. I started SlopeFillers in 2010 with the simple goal of sharing great resort marketing strategies. Today I run marketing for resort ecommerce and CRM provider Inntopia, my home mountain is the lovely Nordic Valley, and my favorite marketing campaign remains the Ski Utah TV show that sold me on skiing as a kid in the 90s.