Is Hootsuite’s Link Preview Deceiving You?

Hootsuite is a powerful social media marketing tool and makes running and monitoring social campaigns significantly more manageable.  However, like other third party social media management tools, Hootsuite is at the mercy of the social networks it’s posting to. It must constantly adjust to function within the social media platform’s rules and development options.  Just because a post appears accurately in Hootsuite does not mean that it will display the same way when posted to social networks.

Hootsuite is actually one of the better tools for including warnings that content might not appear the same as previewed or if they encounter a publishing outage.  However, these warnings are easy to overlook for new users unfamiliar with the terms or digital marketers that are trying to set up posts as quickly as possible.

Recently a client ran into an issue where images set in Hootsuite were accurately displaying in LinkedIn but were different or missing in Facebook and Twitter.  It turned out that a subtle warning was being overlooked.

Here’s what Hootsuite was displaying:

The two samples look exactly the same, but when posted the Facebook content had a different image from the webpage rather than the desired article image.  That’s because the small warning in yellow under the Facebook preview was being overlooked.

Hootsuite allows users to customize a link preview by changing the text or image.  However, many social media platforms only accept those customizations if the domain of the link has been verified.  Other platform don’t accept link customizations at all.  While LinkedIn posts looked accurate, the domain was not verified with Facebook so it was disregarding the link customizations. Twitter was not accept link customization at all.

This is an example of how easy it is to overlook potential problems in Hootsuite.  The dashboards are well laid out but warnings can be missed if they are nested within settings or editing panels, as this one is.  There are actually two warnings about link preview customization that were missed in this case.

In this particular case, verifying the domain was going to be problematic so both Facebook and Twitter posts will include an image only, which both platforms support, rather than a link preview.

It’s important to review your posts on the social networks directly to ensure your content is displaying as you expect.  If it is not, it’s a good idea to take a close look at some of the smaller print in Hootsuite.  Chances are there is a warning and instructions on how to correct the problem.