OG Preview

Open Graph is a set of <meta> tags Facebook introduced in 2010 so that any URL pasted into a feed could carry a title, description, and image instead of a naked link. Every major social platform — including ones that competed bitterly with Facebook — adopted it within a few years, because the alternative was bad-looking link previews and lower engagement. Today, Open Graph is the de facto contract between content publishers and link-sharing surfaces: chat apps, search engines, embed cards, RSS readers, even AI summarisers read these tags first when they encounter a new URL.

The four tags that matter most

og:title, og:description, og:image, and og:url carry almost all the weight. Get those right and you have a working card on every platform. Twitter/X layers a parallel twitter:card family on top — usually summary_large_image for a wide hero, or summary for a compact square thumb. If Twitter-specific tags are missing, X falls back to the Open Graph values, so you only need the twitter: prefix when you want X to display something different from Facebook.

Most "broken share cards" come from one of three things: missing og:image, a cached old version on Facebook, or an image that fails to load over HTTPS.

Image dimensions that work everywhere

Aim for 1200×630. That is the size Facebook recommends, fits X's wide card without cropping, displays cleanly on LinkedIn, and survives WhatsApp's compression. Anything smaller than 600×315 gets demoted to the small-thumb variant on Facebook, and images under 200×200 are ignored outright by several platforms. Stay under 5 MB and use JPEG or PNG — modern WebP works on most surfaces but a few legacy crawlers still choke on it.

The APAC sharing landscape — five platforms, five layouts

Across APAC, the platform mix is fragmented enough that you cannot optimise for one card and call it done. Singapore, Malaysia, Australia, and the Philippines are heavy on WhatsApp and Facebook for link-sharing, with X used by media and tech professionals. Japan and South Korea rely on LINE and KakaoTalk respectively (both consume Open Graph tags the same way WhatsApp does — small thumb left, text right). China uses WeChat almost exclusively, and WeChat reads a different set of tags entirely (wxcards: and JS-SDK hooks), but standard OG still serves the international audience hitting your site from outside the firewall. Indonesia and Vietnam lean heavily on Facebook and TikTok in-app browsers, while India sees a roughly even split between WhatsApp, X, and LinkedIn for professional content. Slack and Microsoft Teams dominate workplace sharing across all of these markets — and both read standard Open Graph.

Why your card looks fine here but broken on Facebook

Facebook aggressively caches the OG response on first scrape. If you change og:image and re-share, Facebook will still show the old image — sometimes for weeks. The fix is the Facebook Sharing Debugger, which lets you force a re-scrape. X has an equivalent Card Validator. LinkedIn caches for around 7 days and has its own Post Inspector. WhatsApp and Slack cache for hours to days depending on whether the link has been shared before. Always test in the debugger after a meta-tag change rather than trusting what shows up in your own feed.

One more thing: og:url and canonicals

The og:url tag should match your canonical URL exactly. If your page is reachable at both example.com/post and example.com/post?utm_source=newsletter, set og:url to the clean canonical version. Facebook deduplicates engagement metrics (likes, shares) per og:url — if every newsletter share has a different URL, you fragment your social proof across dozens of "different" pages. Same goes for trailing slashes — pick one and stick with it.