Social Image not populating

Ronin · ‎02-02-2021

I know that this has been posted elsewhere but I thought I'd help your devs out since they seem to be unable to solve this issue.

Posting a link to social media (FB) does not populate a picture and for a short while now it doesn't even populate the title of the page it is linking to, which makes it really really useless. This should be a high priority for your devs seeing as it really damages marketing through social media.

Now after scouring the internet for a bit I found the Facebook Sharing Debugger tool which clearly tells you, what is wrong. It is a tool that is made explicitly for this issue and shows the user, what Facebook can get from a link and why. I have run my links through the debugger and it shows the following:

It says that og:image and og:description is missing. After a bit more research it shows, that Facebook is unable to obtain any image nor any description (title) of the website the link is connecting to. All this although a picture and description was saved through the page settings on square.

I understand, that Square is new to the website game after obtaining weebly as a platform, but you have to step up your game if basic things like this are not working and you want to stay competitive.

Please. Fix this.

MJD · ‎02-02-2021

Some of these issues may be caused on Facebook's end as when we left the EU they had quite a few issues with fitting to new laws this may just be the aftermath of this, hopefully will be back soon, but if the square devs can do anything that will be great!

Matt - He/They
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Ronin · ‎02-02-2021

Unfortunately I do not believe that this has something to do with Brexit. Facebook's algorithm simply looks for the Open Graph Tags where in "og:image" the letters og stand for Open Graph.

In this example, Facebook is not able to find a meta title in the html code of the page concerning "image" and "description". If the devs could just give us the option to inject code on every page rather than only for the entire website, this might already help.

I am almost sure that the issue lies with Square currently not REALLY saving the settings under "Social" for each page setting.

Ronin · ‎02-02-2021

I just had a closer look at the actual source code of my pages and none of the story pages actually contain any information towards "image" or "description" in the <meta> part of the code.

This confirms my assumption that the Social feature in the page settings is broken.

Please give this to your devs and fix this.

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
    <title> | Ronin Body Arts</title>
    <meta charset="utf-8">
    <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width,initial-scale=1">
    <link rel="shortcut icon" type="image/x-icon" href="/uploads/b/8fc4b690-5a50-11eb-a6df-b3332d2dccff/favicon-32x32.png">
    
    <meta property="og:title" content=" | Ronin Body Arts">
                <meta property="og:site_name" content="Ronin Body Arts">
                        <meta property="og:url" content="https://www.roninbodyarts.co.uk/s/stories/high-quality-high-responsibility">
        <meta property="og:type" content="website">

    <script type="text/javascript" src="https://cdn3.editmysite.com/app/website/js/runtime.63e17294b9acabe80d5b.en.js"></script>

Ronin · ‎02-04-2021

Could I please get an update on this?

tranguyen · ‎02-04-2021

Hi @Ronin, apology for the late reply here! Our team are currently looking into this issue so we can fix this. I don't have more updates at the moment, but I'll follow-up on this thread when I hear more from our team.

Tra | she/her
Community Engagement Program Manager, Square
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Ronin · ‎03-30-2021

Any update on this?

tranguyen · ‎03-31-2021

Hi @Ronin, thanks for checking on this! From talking to our team, they've been able to resolve the underlying issue but need to push out a fix specifically for the Story page component (which is the link in the example). There has been some delayed on this but I hope to have an update soon.

Tra | she/her
Community Engagement Program Manager, Square
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tranguyen · ‎05-14-2021

Hi @Ronin, so sorry that this issue took longer than we expected to be resolved. The team have let me know this issue should now be fixed for the Story page component. When you share a link to your Story page, the social image should now populate as expected.

Tra | she/her
Community Engagement Program Manager, Square
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MJD · ‎05-14-2021

Hey @tranguyen, will the social image populate for all pages? It doesn't seem to do so in Instagram DMs anymore, unsure whether this is the case with posting on Facebook as well? I really should get on top of posting on their to get to the bottom of that 😂

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tranguyen · ‎05-14-2021

Hey @MJD, I just a had a look into myself and I think Instagram DMs might work a bit differently. The image previews should appear for public posts but I'm gonna check in with the team to see if they have any insight about link previews for Instagram DMs (if it helps, I tried sending a link from a different website not with Square and couldn't get the link previews to work as well).

Tra | she/her
Community Engagement Program Manager, Square
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MJD · ‎05-14-2021

It may just be something Instagram stopped supporting around 'the great link purge' where links weren't even allowed to be sent for a while, I was just checking as of course it is a Facebook product therefore used to work with the same as Facebook, however it would make sense as Instagram is a lot less link supportive for this to be the case, thanks for the insight on this, it's really useful!

Matt - He/They
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