Did you know that LinkedIn has a Post Inspector tool? It enables you to see what LinkedIn sees on any URL on the platform, which can be incredibly useful in branding your company, yourself and viewing your competitors.
The tool is for external content providers and internal teams at LinkedIn that provides insight into how we extract metadata so that content providers can easily optimize the sharing experience of their content on the LinkedIn platform.
For example, when members share a link to post on the platform, the Content Ingestion team’s services are tasked with finding the metadata to populate the shared post’s title, image and content provider. Metadata is essentially a bird’s-eye view of the content that gives you an idea of what the content is about, but is not the content itself. This tool helps to help you craft your content so its displayed in a way that makes the content fit seamlessly into the feed experience.
How you can use Post Inspector:
- Discover how to optimize your content for better engagement on LinkedIn. Post Inspector can help you identify the data missing on your page, and what you need to add for your content to have better previews in posts.
- Refresh the data LinkedIn has about your page: If your content has changed recently, you can see when LinkedIn last updated its data on it, and request a re-scrape.
- Debug issues: Learn more about how LinkedIn extracts your content’s metadata, and what could have gone wrong.
You can use Post Inspector to optimize the sharing experience for anything: an article, image, video, personal website, resume—you name it. As long as you have a URL to the content, all you need to do is enter the URL, and LinkedIn will do all the magic to teach you exactly what needs to be done in order for your content to have a fully-enriched sharing card.
How Post Inspector works
Whenever a link is shared, or LinkedIn’s content discovery services find new content, it stores a high-level view of the content. Post Inspector is essentially a visualization of how our metadata extraction process works. In order to build Post Inspector to achieve its purpose, they added new logic to the extraction process that adds annotations and ingestion feedback when retrieving the content metadata.
How Post Inspector works: The annotation process
LinkedIn can receive a URL to content that it needs to extract through several means. For instance, someone could share a link, embed a content preview in a Pulse article or the content discovery tool could send an extraction request. LinkedIn augmented the extraction process to add annotations to the metadata and ingestion feedback for scenarios in which it couldn’t extract any content.