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Social Share Preview

Customize the image, title, and description that appear when your tracking links are shared on social platforms like Slack, WhatsApp, Twitter/X, LinkedIn, Discord, and Facebook.

Overview​

When someone shares a LinkForty short link, the receiving platform fetches the URL and renders an Open Graph preview card from the page's meta tags. Without configured previews, that card is just the raw URL — no image, no context, no signal of brand trust.

Social Share Preview lets you decide exactly what that card looks like, with two configurable layers:

  • Organization default — applies to every short link in your workspace.
  • Per-template override — campaign-specific cards that take priority over the org default.
Required permission

Only organization admins can configure Social Share Preview. Members can view the page but cannot upload images or change titles/descriptions.

Configuring the organization default​

This is the card that appears for any link in your workspace that doesn't have a more specific override.

Step 1: Navigate to the Social Share Preview page

  1. Log in to your LinkForty dashboard.
  2. Click "Social Share Preview" in the left sidebar.
  3. The Organization Default tab is selected by default.

Step 2: Upload the preview image

Click the image upload area and select a PNG or JPG file from your computer.

Image guidelines
  • Recommended size: 1200 × 630 pixels (the standard Open Graph aspect ratio used by Twitter / Slack / LinkedIn for their summary_large_image cards).
  • File size: up to 5 MB.
  • Format: PNG or JPG only.
  • LinkForty automatically resizes and generates a 400 × 210 thumbnail for fast unfurls on chat platforms.

Step 3: Set the title

The headline shown above the image. Up to 255 characters.

Step 4: Set the description

Supporting copy shown below the title. Up to 500 characters.

Step 5: Save

Click Save changes. The new preview is live immediately — the next time a social platform crawls one of your short links, it picks up the new card.

The Live Preview panel on the right shows how the card will appear on social platforms.

Per-template overrides​

For campaign-specific links, you can configure a different preview per template. This is useful when a single workspace runs multiple campaigns with distinct branding.

  1. On the Social Share Preview page, switch to the Per Template tab.
  2. Select a template from the dropdown.
  3. Configure the image, title, and description for that template (same form as the org default).
  4. Save.

Links generated from that template will now use the template's card. Links from any other template fall back to the organization default.

How the layering works​

When a social platform fetches one of your short links, LinkForty resolves the preview in this order:

  1. Per-template preview — if the link's template has a configured preview, use it.
  2. Organization default preview — if no template preview, use the org-level configuration.
  3. Link-level OG fields — if neither is configured, use the link's individual og_title / og_description / og_image_url (set during link creation).
  4. Link title and description — final fallback.
  5. Site default — if everything above is empty, a generic "Shared Link" placeholder.

The system is designed so something useful always renders.

Removing a configured preview​

Click Remove image to clear the image but keep the title and description. To remove the entire preview (image, title, and description), clear the title field and save with an empty value.

How it works under the hood​

A few details that are useful when verifying behavior:

Scraper detection​

When a social platform crawls one of your short links, LinkForty's redirect server detects it by User-Agent. Known crawlers include:

  • facebookexternalhit / Facebot
  • Twitterbot
  • LinkedInBot
  • Slackbot
  • Discordbot
  • TelegramBot
  • WhatsApp
  • PinterestBot
  • SkypeUriPreview
  • Bluesky and Mastodon validators

For any of these, the redirect server serves an HTML response with the configured Open Graph and Twitter Card meta tags. Human visitors continue to get the normal redirect — they never see the preview HTML.

Image delivery​

Uploaded images go to S3 (or compatible object storage). The OG meta tags point straight at the public CDN URL — no extra round-trip through your application server. A 400 × 210 thumbnail is generated client-side at upload time and served to chat platforms that prefer smaller images for fast unfurls.

Caching​

Both the link lookup and the preview configuration are cached in Redis with a 5-minute TTL. Scraper traffic doesn't hit the database on every request. The normal redirect path stays just as fast as before.

Verifying a card​

After configuring, test how the card looks before sending it out:

If you don't see your changes immediately, the platform may have cached the previous card. Most validators offer a "Scrape Again" option to force a fresh fetch.

Self-hosting requirements​

Social Share Preview requires S3-compatible object storage to be configured on your deployment. Without it, the dashboard page renders a clear "S3 not configured" message. Set the following backend environment variables to enable uploads:

AWS_BUCKET=your-bucket-name
AWS_REGION=us-east-1
AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID=...
AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=...

See the Self-Hosting Guide for the full deployment checklist.