Linkedin: Sharing URL Summary not appearing

Question

I'm not sure if this is new behaviour or if it didn't work at all. So I'm using the LinkedIn Customized URL feature, you can look it up here. The URL looks like this:

https://www.linkedin.com/shareArticle?mini=true&url=http://developer.linkedin.com&title=LinkedIn%20Developer%20Network&summary=My%20favorite%20developer%20program&source=LinkedIn

Once I share the URL the provided summary is not shown in the post preview:

So I tried with other services like Youtube, Reddit etc. and all posts do not include the provided summary.

Unfortunately I can't provide you the open-graph tags I used on my site as it's running in a corporate environment and I'm not sure if I can provide these snippets as of now.

However, running linkedin's Post Inspector shows that it detects my summary without problems:

Values are in German if anyone wonders...

So my quick and fairly simple questions, which might be answered in a comment as well, are:

Did linkedin change something on their side? Is there some other undocumented property which neither youtube nor me included in the customized URL and therefore the summary does not show up? Is there any post from linkedin developers which note this change? Was it like that all the time or is it just a temporary thing?

Jive

Why the downvote and close request? This is a legitimate question and I also tagged it with the linkedin tag. According to the linkedin docs I should ask questions via SO. – Jive

We're also noticing that any querystring values in the URL are lost. If the URL was respected at least we could use it and just let the user type in their own summary. We're using the querystring parameters to pass referral codes, and since those get dropped, it will negatively impact our users... – Perpetual

Hey @Guardian, no information at the moment. We switched our integration to forcing people to sign into our linkedin app and post the status via REST API. Not a good solution for such a simple case but it's needed... Linkedin is not giving any feedback whatsoever. I can't submit error reports in their forum as it yields a 401 unauthorized when I try to submit a post. Their docs are absurdly painful to work with tbh and their support forum reflects that. – Jive

They seem to have started forcing people to sign in through Linkedin oAuth for those parameters. However you look, it seems like a foolish decision to me... – Damal

Answer 1

Main Problem People are Experiencing: You cannot display BOTH an image and a description. You may only use one. Indicating an OG tag for image means your description will not display. Source: Arguing with LinkedIn Support for 2 Weeks.

LinkedIn only supports one parameter in their share content now:

https://www.linkedin.com/sharing/share-offsite/?url={url}

Source: Microsoft LinkedIn Share URL Documentation.

If you want to specify title and summary, then you need the og tags, but these are things LinkedIn associates with the URL, and it doesn't populate in the message body.

Otherwise, this works for me:

https://www.linkedin.com/sharing/share-offsite/?url=http://www.wikipedia.org/

Works fine:

If you are interested in a regularly maintained GitHub project that keeps track of this so you don't have to, check it out! Social Share URLs

Mammillate

Answer 2

LinkedIn now uses the Open Graph tags to show the preview.

Below are the og:tags that must exist and their correct format:

<meta property='og:title' content='Title of the article"/>
<meta property='og:image' content='//media.example.com/ 1234567.jpg"/>
<meta property='og:description' content='Description that will show in the preview"/>
<meta property='og:url' content='//www.example.com/URL of the article" />

And the sharing url is changed to:

https://www.linkedin.com/sharing/share-offsite/?url=your_encoded_url

Please see this Making Your Website Shareable on LinkedIn

Okeechobee

I think OP is aware of that since the linkedin debugger displays the scraped description from his post via the LinkedIn Share Console... I have the same problem, the debugger of LinkedIn finds the descriptions, but it's nowhere in the post itself. – Doggery