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I have an app that lets people post content to their LinkedIn page. What I want to do is create a button that I can include in an email that when clicked, will send the user to LinkedIn and open the box to share a post. What I would like to know is how to generate this url. What is the structure like? All the information I've found so far is about how to share a link to another website on LinkedIn, not how to direct a user to the share post box.

Example link: https://www.linkedin.com/share?id=0123456789

linkedin

Daniel Bonnell
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3 Answers3

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First step, let's see what URL is right...

2010:

https://www.linkedin.com/cws/share?url={url}

2015:

https://www.linkedin.com/shareArticle?url={url}&title={title}&summary={text}&source={provider}

2020:

https://www.linkedin.com/sharing/share-offsite/?url={url}

Official Microsoft LinkedIn Share API Documentation. Of course, don't take our word for it! Any of the above URL formats will redirect to the 2020 URL format.

Second step, just how do you use things like `summary`, `title`, etc.?

Use og: tags in the <head> block of your HTML! To quote the documentation, these should look like...

  • <meta property='og:title' content='Title of the article'/>
  • <meta property='og:image' content='//media.example.com/ 1234567.jpg'/>
  • <meta property='og:description' content='Description that will show in the preview'/>
  • <meta property='og:url' content='//www.example.com/URL of the article' />

Source: LinkedIn Share Documentation: Making Your Website Shareable on LinkedIn

Third step, now want to check to see you did everything right?

That's the easy part! Take the URL you are sharing (i.e., example.com, not linkedin.com?share=example.com), and input it into the LinkedIn Post Inspector. You will be told everything that goes into determining how your webpage is shared on LinkedIn, from og: tags to oEmbed data.

Here's an online demo with share links to 20+ services. Check the source code and you can see first-hand how the share link for Linkedin works!

Fourth step, why doesn't the `og:description` tag work?

I have a more detailed answer elsewhere on the og:description tag not displaying in the LinkedIn preview.

If you are interested in a regularly maintained GitHub project that keeps track of this so you don't have to, check it out! I'm a contributor! Social Share URLs

Social Share URLs Image

HoldOffHunger
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From the LinkedIn developer docs ("Customized URL" tab):

https://www.linkedin.com/shareArticle?mini=true&url=http://developer.linkedin.com&title=LinkedIn%20Developer%20Network&summary=My%20favorite%20developer%20program&source=LinkedIn
Justin Kominar
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    May be its old thread but can you help me with title and summary. It is not picking up title and summary for posts. – Shubham Nigam Aug 08 '18 at 19:06
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    @ShubhamNigam You'll need to use meta tags. You can then use [this](https://www.linkedin.com/post-inspector/inspect) tool to debug your share content. – pdoherty926 Sep 09 '18 at 06:08
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    Docs are updated with new API: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/linkedin/consumer/integrations/self-serve/share-on-linkedin?context=linkedin/consumer/context – Himanshu Aggarwal Feb 18 '19 at 15:29
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    You can also use `https://www.linkedin.com/sharing/share-offsite/?url=...` – Sebastien May 24 '19 at 15:55
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    The URL parameters no longer work, LinkedIn has removed them – Murhaf Sousli Sep 20 '19 at 01:14
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    linkedIn share with url does not working for me. Do you know any other way to do this? – Priya jain Nov 26 '19 at 10:30
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    It seems that he sharing/share-offsite on works on some URLs. When it doesn't, here is an error in the console but it doesn't provide any insight. – jayflo Jan 27 '20 at 14:28
  • One of the reasons for the URLs not working is the size of the shared site payload. When checking the inspector and providing a link to article where the HTML exceeds 3M, it says `We did not scrape the content because it was larger than our threshold of 3.00M bytes.` – Jakub Žitný Mar 19 '21 at 13:14
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Had issues with LinkedIn Sharing and found a resolve:

Sites shared with Non-SSL (http) addresses will display the error: "Something went wrong - Try again"

https://www.linkedin.com/sharing/share-offsite/?url=http://example.com

How to fix the "Something went wrong" share link error:

Modify the beginning the {url} - replacing the http with https:

https://www.linkedin.com/sharing/share-offsite/?url=https://example.com

Visit the link to generate LinkedIn's thumbnail and page description.

Both share link addresses for Non-SSL (http) and SSL (https) will work correctly now.

Edit: Replace //example.com with your website

Bartosz Wyrwich
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    That's incorrect. `example.com` is ***always*** an invalid, test-domain. I'm not seeing "thumbnail and page description" for example.com, probably because it doesn't exist. And this works fine without error and it's HTTP-only: https://www.linkedin.com/sharing/share-offsite/?url=http://google.com – HoldOffHunger Feb 16 '21 at 12:48
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    That's because example.com is an example. You need to replace it with a real URL but the information I provide still stands. Your Google link isn't a good example because it would have the thumbnail and page description already generated. This is specifically addressing a concern I've seen mentioned in multiple places for developers with new websites that are recently built but cannot get the LinkedIn Share to work. – Bartosz Wyrwich Feb 19 '21 at 00:51
  • Right, `example.com` doesn't work, but `google.com` does work. What makes you think *"Your google link isn't a good example"*, when it works, and when your link does not? – HoldOffHunger Feb 19 '21 at 04:09
  • Because Google has already been crawled by LinkedIn. Forget example.com - it's a placeholder for 'yourwebsite.xyz'. When a website is initially created - LinkedIn will only crawl a https version of the site. What I'm saying is - a developer who hasn't enabled SSL will encounter this problem. You can recreate this by creating a brand new website and domain that has never been shared in LinkedIn. Don't enable SSL and try to share it via LinkedIn. It will cause an error "Something went wrong - Try again" – Bartosz Wyrwich Feb 19 '21 at 04:51
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    Not seeing that problem. I've never shared holdoffhunger.com on linkedin, and it works fine with http-only: https://www.linkedin.com/sharing/share-offsite/?url=http://www.holdoffhunger.com – HoldOffHunger Feb 19 '21 at 14:12
  • Had the same issue. What fixed it for me is that I used https://www.linkedin.com/post-inspector/inspect tool first to crawl the page. And after that the https://www.linkedin.com/sharing/share-offsite/?url={url} was working. As someone else said, they might be having a limit of the HTML size to 3MB and not being able to crawl the page from the share url. – o4ned Feb 23 '22 at 08:13