I share my article on social media but the preview image doesn't show up

When you share your article URL on social media, these social networks use meta tags to generate a preview 'card'. Such a card will grab the title and description as well as the featured image to generate a link with a preview of your content. 

For example, on X (formerly Twitter) such a card may look like this:

Sometimes it can occur that you share a link on social media, only to realise that the title, description or featured image needs to be changed.

So you change it - and then you notice that the change is not visible in the generated preview card.

What happened is that the social network has cached the old preview card. Fortunately it's possible to force these social networks to clear their cache and update the preview card data. This can be done at the following links:

• Facebook: https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/ Paste the URL, click 'Debug', then 'Scrape Again' (login required)
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/post-inspector/ Paste the URL, click 'Inspect'

The X card validator has been discontinued, but you can see a preview at opengraph.xyz.

In each case the cache will be cleared and you will see a preview of the new card.