What Are Link Previews

The previews you see when you share a link on social media or messaging platforms are called unfurling. Now common lingo in tech, the actual definition of “unfurling” is “to spread out from a rolled or folded state”. Most messaging and social media platforms attempt to “roll out” information such as the Image, Title, Description, and more from links that are shared.

Here’s what an unfurled link, or a link preview, looks like in Slack:

In this link preview in Slack, the following is displayed:

• URL
• Favicon
• Site Title
• Page Title
• Description
• Image
• Author
• Reading Time
• Publish Date

Here is the code that powers what you see in the preview:

<title>How to Get Your Campground Ready for the Summer Season | Campspot Software</title>

<meta name="description" content="Here's how to get your campground ready for the summer season, with a complete checklist to maximize revenue and have fun.">

<link rel="canonical" href="https://software.campspot.com/blog/how-to-get-your-campground-ready-for-the-summer-season/">

<meta property="og:locale" content="en_US">

<meta property="og:type" content="article">

<meta property="og:title" content="How to Get Your Campground Ready for the Summer Season | Campspot Software">

<meta property="og:description" content="Here's how to get your campground ready for the summer season, with a complete checklist to maximize revenue and have fun.">

<meta property="og:url" content="https://software.campspot.com/blog/how-to-get-your-campground-ready-for-the-summer-season/">

<meta property="og:site_name" content="Campspot Software">

<meta property="article:publisher" content="https://www.facebook.com/CampspotSoftware">

<meta property="article:published_time" content="2024-02-07T21:28:00+00:00">

<meta property="article:modified_time" content="2024-02-08T19:51:14+00:00">

<meta property="og:image" content="https://software.campspot.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/how-to-get-campground-ready-summer.jpg">

<meta property="og:image:width" content="1980">

<meta property="og:image:height" content="1130">

<meta property="og:image:type" content="image/jpeg">

<meta name="author" content="Liz Pun">

<meta name="twitter:card" content="summary_large_image">

<meta name="twitter:label1" content="Written by">

<meta name="twitter:data1" content="Liz Pun">

<meta name="twitter:label2" content="Est. reading time">

<meta name="twitter:data2" content="9 minutes">

Slack has documentation about how unfurling links work here. Many social media and messaging platforms will have similar documentation. 

Debugging Tools

Slack doesn’t have a debugging or preview tool like Facebook and LinkedIn do. These debugging tools are useful to inspect how your post will look prior to sharing. Twitter used to have a debugging tool, but X has removed preview functionality from the Card Validator. We have more information on Twitter/X’s link unfurling capabilities here.

If you’re looking for a way to check and debug your link preview on Slack or Twitter/X before you share, try our Social Share Preview tool here.

Preview Before You Share!

Try our Social Sharing Preview and Meta Tags Audit Tool, including previews for Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Google, and Slack.

Try For Free

How To Set Up Meta Tags To Power Link Previews

Unfurled previews are a great feature that most social media and messaging platforms support. In fact, we’ve also seen links unfurl in places other than social media and messaging platforms—cloud documents such as Google Sheets and Docs, project management platforms such as Asana and ClickUp, and even in Outlook emails. 

Improving how your site looks when shared and previewed isn’t difficult. Usually the information is there, you may just have to tweak some code. And when you solve for major platforms like Facebook and Instagram, you solve for most others at the same time. We have a guide here about how to set up preview images on your website.