Social Media Shares & the CMS

When anyone shares one of our pages on a social media platform, the CMS automatically passes the following information to that service:

1. Page Title (Name) 
2. Meta Description
3. Main Image

If you do not edit the "Share" tab in that page, these values are grabbed from your existing story. However, our headlines and descriptions are often much, much longer than social media platforms will display. To help optimize how your content is shared, it's advisable to edit these values to be more in line with social media platforms.

How to Edit Social Media Shares

1. Open your story (or page) in the CMS.
2. Under Content, select the Share tab.
3. From here you can replace the text or graphics. You can even use an image not displayed in your story.

How to Test on Twitter, LinkedIn, and/or Facebook

Since social media platforms are constantly changing their standards, the CMS only generates an approximation of what each social media service will actually share. Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook allow you to preview exactly how your page will share, but the page must be published first.

Copy and paste the published URL into these social media testing tools and hit "enter." 

• Twitter Card Validator:https://cards-dev.twitter.com/validator
  (Getting an error? Try Twitter's troubleshooting guide)
• LinkedIn Post Inspector:https://www.linkedin.com/post-inspector/
• "Meta" (formerly Facebook) Sharing Debugger: https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/sharing/

Twitter Card Validator Example

While this headline fits handily (I actually trimmed it), you'll note the text trails off. It's not imperative the text fit perfectly, but it would be a good idea to get enough in the description to encourage a click-through.