How do I get link previews when sharing on Facebook?
When you share a link on Facebook, their system tries to pull in the page title, description and a relevant image from the page to display along with your post.
The good news is you can still benefit from this when using custom domain tracking links on Facebook, you just have to be aware of one limitation:
With custom domains set up using Script Forwarding, cloaking must be set to “No” within the custom file you upload to your server.
With the CNAME DNS method it should just work fine with either setting.
Then in your ClickMagick account, for each of your tracking links, you have two options …
If you want Facebook to automatically generate a link preview for your tracking link you must set Cloaking to “No” in your link settings.
If you set Cloaking to “Yes” in your link settings, you will need to manually provide the Title, Description and Image URL so Facebook can generate the preview.
If you plan on using a lot of tracking links on Facebook and want to take advantage of the automated link previews, you may want to consider setting up a dedicated domain just for Facebook if you need to use other types of cloaking combinations for other links.
Note: Sometimes Facebook’s system is a little flaky. After you create or edit a link it can take up to 1 hour or longer for the preview to work properly on Facebook if you’re using custom meta data (title, image, etc).
… And occasionally it won’t work at all in which case you should simply try editing your link (even if you don’t change anything) which will signal Facebook to try fetching the correct info again.
Facebook also employs various caching mechanisms that can cause you to see outdated meta info if you add it or change it after you’ve initially created the tracking link.
In this case you should use Facebook’s Open Graph Debugger Tool to “Fetch new scrape information.”
Tip: The maximum recommended image size for Facebook previews is 560 x 292 pixels. If you use a larger image Facebook will resize it smaller—and depending upon how big an image you start with and what it contains, text within the image may not be readable once they shrink it down.