User avatar as post image in LinkedIn

Hi Ben Tiedt ,

This issue popped up again for another one of our employees regarding this post he was trying to share on LinkedIn: https://sugarclub.sugarcrm.com/ll/f/conversations/5040/crm-is-special . According to the Post Inspector you shared before, LinkedIn is basically grabbing the smallest possible version of his avatar (https://www.linkedin.com/post-inspector/inspect/https:%2F%2Fsugarclub.sugarcrm.com%2Fll%2Ff%2Fconversations%2F5040%2Fcrm-is-special). 

Do you have any suggestions on the community side that could improve this? The only thing I can think of is adding an image to the post (haven't tested this yet), or he's been suggested to post it in a different manner on LinkedIn to try to bypass the auto-populated image. However, these are intrusive workarounds and this is hindering executive buy-in for promoting our community (i.e. I want to make it easy for them to draw LinkedIn followers to our site).

Thanks!

Hi Ben Tiedt ,

This issue popped up again for another one of our employees regarding this post he was trying to share on LinkedIn: https://sugarclub.sugarcrm.com/ll/f/conversations/5040/crm-is-special . According to the Post Inspector you shared before, LinkedIn is basically grabbing the smallest possible version of his avatar (https://www.linkedin.com/post-inspector/inspect/https:%2F%2Fsugarclub.sugarcrm.com%2Fll%2Ff%2Fconversations%2F5040%2Fcrm-is-special). 

Do you have any suggestions on the community side that could improve this? The only thing I can think of is adding an image to the post (haven't tested this yet), or he's been suggested to post it in a different manner on LinkedIn to try to bypass the auto-populated image. However, these are intrusive workarounds and this is hindering executive buy-in for promoting our community (i.e. I want to make it easy for them to draw LinkedIn followers to our site).

Thanks!

Hi Alex, you can look at core_v2_page.AddOpenGraphMetaTag for adding an "og:image" meta tag. You could specify it to fall back to the group avatar or site logo, for instance, if there was no image associated with the post.

Thanks, Steven Heffner . That helped to give some more info. I was curious as I found a widget, SEO Meta Data for Content Pages, which appears to have a field to define that og:image meta tag you mentioned. I tried adding it on the Forum Thread page and to the group's header (and locking it) as this group only has one application (that forum). Uploading an image and publishing the theme didn't appear to help. 

I then tried to (in our staging site) create a duplicate of that widget in Widget Studio, removed most of the Content options, and edited line 2 from  #set($page = $core_v2_customPage.Current) to   #set($page = $core_v2_page.Current) :

      #set($page = false)
      #set($page = $core_v2_page.Current)

      #if (!$page)
      $core_v2_widget.Hide()
      #end

      #set($ogImage =  $core_v2_widget.GetUrlValue("openGraphImage",""))
      #if($ogImage != "")
      $core_v2_page.AddOpenGraphMetaTag("og:image",$core_v2_encoding.HtmlAttributeEncode($core_v2_page.AbsoluteUrl($ogImage)))
      #end

I also removed all of the configuration settings, other than to control the image:

      <propertyGroup id="openGraph" resourceName="OpenGraph">
        <property id="openGraphImage" dataType="url" defaultValue="" resourceName="OpenGraphImage" descriptionResourceName="OpenGraphImage_Description"  controlType="Telligent.Evolution.Controls.ThemeFileUrlControl, Telligent.Evolution.Platform">
          <propertyRule type="Telligent.Evolution.Controls.PropertyRules.FileExtensionRule, Telligent.Evolution.Platform" validExtensions="gif,jpg,jpeg,png" />
        </property>

      </propertyGroup>

I re-tested with the same basic steps as above, but using the link Ben shared, https://www.linkedin.com/post-inspector/inspect, I wasn't getting any changes. 

Am I overcomplicating this? Can I just add an Unfiltered HTML widget to the header and put in something like:

core_v2_page.AddOpenGraphMetaTag(og:image, {url_of_image});

Any ideas? Thank you!

I'll leave my above reply in case there is something that can be built on or if it helps anyone in the future, but I made some progress on this specific issue with the help of Kevin Cunningham 's reply here (thanks Kevin!):  RE: Global "no index no follow"? . I used the package that Kevin created and changed the content to core_v2_page.AddOpenGraphMetaTag("og:image", "{my image file}");

I deployed the widget on the Forum Thread page for this group and the image now shows properly. I need to make some changes to the actual image file that's being used, but it's a huge improvement over the pixelated avatar that was there before. 

The "SEO for Content Pages" widget is for custom content pages, since they do not have any actual content object to base their header generation off of Standard pages for content generate those headers based on data supplied from the content itself. And yes, the core_v2_page.AddOpenGraphMetaTag method is the supported way to change those values from the widget.