A Social Image is a great way to help highlight your content when sharing it in social media and platforms that support them.
Starting in February 2024, content types with the Social Image field allow you to specify and alternate images used on social medial.
The social image field is optional. Other images will be used if a social image is not specified. The image used is determined in the following order of priority:
- Social Image
- Featured Image (Articles and Events) or Header Background Image (Pages, Departments, others)
- Images in the body of the content. This is less reliable and largely depends on the platform where the link is shared.
For example:
- If an article is saved with a Featured Image only, that image will be used as the thumbnail on our site and when shared on social media. In most cases, this is completely acceptable and all that is necessary.
- If an article has separate Featured and Social Images, the Featured image will be used as the thumbnail throughout our site, while the Social image will be used when sharing on social media.
FAQs
How do I add a social image?
- Look for the "Social Image" media field near other setting and metadata options.
What are the dimensions of a social image?
- Images should be at least 1200 × 630 px. Drupal will fine tune the sizes as long as the image is roughly this size or larger.
What is the difference between Featured and Social Images?
- Featured images are used internally to generate thumbnails for content in news feeds throughout the site and may be used as social media images.
- Social Images are only used externally for sharing content on social media or platforms that support og:image metatags.
Tips, Tools and Troubleshooting
Testing that your social image will appear correctly, here are a couple of ways to test that your page will appear correctly on social media.
- LinkedIn Post inspector, put in your URL and click the button. This tool will show you what your post will look like when you post it on LinkedIn.
- Facebook Sharing Debugger - Put in your URL and click the button. You will see what your Facebook post will look like.
- Twitter or X - Create a post, when you paste in the URL, Twitter will allow you to see the image.
- Twitter card Validator - This is a third-party Twitter card validator, twitter used to have one, but it no longer works. This person built it using Twitter's API. Like the others past in your URL click the button, and it will show you what the tweet will look like.
Why doesn't my page show an image when I share it on Social Media?
- The page may have been published without an image
- The page may have been shared without an image, and social media are looking at a cached version of the page.
What are some ways of making sure my social media image shows?
- If the page has been cached, and it showing an older version, you can try adding "?v=2" or "/?v=2" at the end of your URL, this will clear the cache. You can use any number it does not need to be the #2.
- Facebook has provided 2 links, Best Practices for Sharing and Images in Link Shares, they mention that the first person to go to post a page won't see an image, so they recommend using the debugger to pre-cache the image.