Social Metadata: Why Your Links Look Broken on Social Media
Someone shares a link to your carefully crafted blog post on Twitter. Instead of an engaging preview with your headline and a compelling image, the tweet shows… your URL. Just text. No image, no description, nothing to make anyone want to click.
Or maybe they share your product page on Facebook. The preview shows a random image pulled from your sidebar. The description is cut off mid-sentence from some unrelated text. Your brand looks unprofessional, and the person who shared the link looks like they didn’t know what they were doing.
Social metadata—the Open Graph tags and Twitter Card markup that control how links appear when shared—is one of the most frequently overlooked aspects of web development. When it’s right, nobody notices. When it’s wrong or missing, your content looks broken every single time someone shares it.
What Social Metadata Actually Does
When you paste a link into a social media post, the platform doesn’t just display the URL. It fetches the page and looks for specific metadata that describes how the link should appear. This is your opportunity to control the narrative.
Open Graph is the protocol Facebook created that most platforms now support. Tags like og:title, og:description, and og:image tell social platforms exactly what to display. Without them, platforms guess—and they often guess wrong.
Twitter Cards are Twitter’s version of the same concept. They can use Open Graph tags as fallbacks but have their own specific tags like twitter:card and twitter:image for custom control.
When these tags are properly configured, shared links display with:
- A compelling headline you’ve chosen
- A description that summarizes the content
- An image sized correctly for social feeds
- Your brand presented professionally
When they’re missing or misconfigured, platforms improvise. They might pull your page’s title tag (which may be formatted for search, not social), grab whatever image appears first on the page (possibly an icon or navigation element), and extract description text that doesn’t make sense out of context.
Good vs. Bad Social Previews
Consider the difference in what people see when your link is shared.
Without proper metadata: A shared link might appear as just a URL, or with a tiny favicon and the first few words of your page. The person scrolling sees nothing compelling to click. Even if the content behind that link is excellent, nobody can tell from the preview.
With partial metadata: Maybe you have a title but no image. The preview looks sparse compared to fully-configured posts in the feed. Or you have an image but it’s the wrong aspect ratio, getting cropped awkwardly and cutting off important content.
With proper metadata: The preview shows a headline that hooks interest, a description that expands on the promise, and an image that’s visually compelling and correctly sized. The shared link looks like it deserves attention. The person sharing your content looks good for sharing it.
The difference affects not just whether people click, but whether people share in the first place. If someone previews their share and it looks broken, they might delete it rather than post something embarrassing. Your content never gets shared at all.
Why Social Metadata Gets Overlooked
Given the visibility of social shares, you might expect social metadata to be a standard part of web development. Yet it’s consistently missing from otherwise polished websites. Several factors explain the gap.
It’s not visible on your site. Unlike design or content issues, social metadata problems are invisible until someone shares a link. Your team might review every page visually without ever seeing the preview problem.
Testing requires external tools. You can’t see Open Graph tags by viewing your page. You need to use Facebook’s debugger, Twitter’s Card Validator, or similar tools. This extra step often gets skipped.
CMS platforms vary in support. Some platforms generate social metadata automatically; others require plugins or custom code. The more abstracted your content management, the easier it is to miss this layer.
Different platforms need different assets. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and others have different optimal image sizes. A single image won’t look perfect everywhere. Managing multiple assets per page adds complexity.
Metadata can break silently. Template changes, plugin updates, or platform migrations can remove or misconfigure social tags. Without testing, you won’t know until someone complains about an ugly share preview.
Content teams don’t think about it. Writers focus on the article itself, not the meta layers around it. Social metadata is a technical concern that falls between content creation and web development—and sometimes falls through the gap entirely.
Essential Social Metadata Tags
Getting social previews right doesn’t require dozens of tags. A focused set covers most needs.
For Open Graph (Facebook, LinkedIn, and most platforms)
og:title - The headline for your shared link. This can differ from your page title, optimized for social rather than search.
og:description - A summary of your content. Keep it compelling and under 200 characters for safety.
og:image - The preview image. Facebook recommends 1200×630 pixels. Always use absolute URLs, not relative paths.
og:url - The canonical URL for the content. This helps with analytics and prevents duplicate shares.
og:type - Usually “website” or “article.” Helps platforms understand the content category.
For Twitter Cards
twitter:card - The card type. “summary_large_image” displays a large image preview, which usually performs better.
twitter:title and twitter:description - Can differ from Open Graph tags if you want Twitter-specific messaging, but most sites use the same content.
twitter:image - Twitter has different aspect ratio preferences, but typically uses your og:image as fallback.
For All Platforms
Make sure your images are high quality, properly sized, and include important content within the “safe zone” (the center portion that all platforms display even with different cropping).
How Auditoro Helps
Manually checking social metadata requires using external validation tools for each page, for each platform. This is tedious for a single page and impractical for an entire site.
Auditoro scans your pages for social metadata as part of its comprehensive site analysis. It checks for the presence of required Open Graph and Twitter Card tags, identifying pages where metadata is missing or incomplete.
The scanning covers your entire site, not just pages you remember to check. Blog posts from last year, product pages added by your team, landing pages from past campaigns—everything gets reviewed.
When issues are found, you see exactly which pages have problems and what’s missing. This specificity makes fixes practical rather than overwhelming.
Scheduled scans catch regressions over time. Template changes that break metadata, new content added without tags, or plugin updates that affect your social tags—you learn about problems quickly rather than discovering them through disappointing share previews.
Results integrate with your complete site health picture. Social metadata issues appear alongside SEO problems, broken links, and other concerns. You can prioritize fixes based on page importance and impact.
Building Social-Ready Content
Beyond the technical implementation, think about how your content appears when shared.
Craft headlines for sharing. Your page title might be optimized for search, but your og:title should make people want to click in a social feed. These can be different.
Choose images deliberately. The image is often the first thing people notice in a social preview. Generic stock photos blend into the feed. Distinctive, relevant images stand out.
Write descriptions that hook. Your meta description might work for search snippets, but social requires different thinking. Lead with what makes the content valuable or interesting.
Test before publishing. Use Facebook’s Sharing Debugger and Twitter’s Card Validator to preview how your content will appear. Fix problems before the first share, not after.
Clear caches after updates. Social platforms cache your metadata. When you update tags, you may need to force platforms to re-fetch your page.
Social sharing amplifies your best content—when it works properly. Every shared link is an impression of your brand. Making those impressions count starts with getting your metadata right.
Ready to check your social metadata? Start a free scan with Auditoro and see how your pages will look when shared.