Social Media can drive some serious ROI if done right. The best way to do that is with media - it’s perfect for social media attention spans, so it tends to ’travel' better than blocks of text. Now that you’ve got your media uploaded to Wistia, how do you share it and track the performance on Social Media sites? This page will help. The three services we’re focused on here are Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. If you’re not using these platforms (or you are!) and you want to share your media through other methods, such as in an email, you can use Copy Link and Thumbnail to paste the thumbnail of your media. When clicked, viewers will be directly taken to your media in Wistia!

X's Twitter Card functionality allows you to share a link to a Wistia media that can be played directly on the platform.

On the Overview page for your desired media, click the blue Share button to open the Share Link tab.

Keep in mind, a user will have to hit play on the media in their feed, but that magical media treat will play right inline once they do so.

When you add the link to your Wistia media to Facebook, it will automatically embed a thumbnail for viewers to click. When your followers click on the thumbnail image, it will take them to the media page of your Wistia account.

First, open the media in your account and make sure it has a description! If it doesn’t currently have a description, hover over the title and click “Edit” to get started.

Select “Share,” which will take you to the “Share Link” tab in the Share modal.

Copy the URL and enter it in Facebook’s Status Update. The media thumbnail and description will be pulled in and ready to share!

Once you share the update, the media thumbnail will appear instantly in the Facebook news feed.

Sometimes you’re just not happy with the thumbnail that displays for your media, it happens to all of us. So you head to the Customize panel and update that beautiful thumbnail. Super easy, right?

But when you go to Facebook the new information doesn’t show up for your media no matter how many times you reload the page or repost the media. Bummer!

Stay calm, media friend. The good news is that we’ve got a solution: The Facebook Debugger!

The Facebook Debugger allows you to input your media’s URL so that Facebook will re-scrape it for its metadata (like the media thumbnail and title). When you share content on Facebook, the shared page often contains Open Graph tags that tell Facebook which information about your media to display for your post. OG tags include your thumbnail, as well as things like the title and description.

The problem with updating your media information is that Facebook will only automatically re-scrape this information every 30 days. When you put your media’s URL into the Facebook Debugger, you are letting Facebook know that it should re-scrape your media’s metadata. This will update its cache for your media and display all your brand new information. 👍

Maybe you want to post your thumbnail to Facebook, but you want the link for it to point back to your website? If so, you can use the Open Graph tags we produce for ’public' medias to accomplish this. Facebook uses the Open Graph tags to specify what content from the website should be posted.

To do this, first embed the media on your website. Make sure your folder is unlocked, and add a description (descriptions are covered in the media above).

View the source on the media page, and look for all of the tags of the form:

(there should be ~8 of these tags)

Here’s a screenshot:

These are the Open Graph tags we have created for your media. You will need to change the og:url tag to be the URL of the page where you have embedded the media (and are putting the OpenGraph tags).

Add these to the head of your website, and then share the URL of that page on Facebook.

You’re good to go!

LinkedIn currently accepts Wistia link & thumbnail embeds within some areas of its platform, specifically Posts and LinkedIn Pulse Articles. Embedding Wistia medias in profiles is not supported by LinkedIn at this time.

To embed your media on LinkedIn, all you need is the media’s Wistia URL or Social Sharing link. Something like: https://private-sharing.wistia.com/medias/z18mbi6ve1.

Medias embedded in LinkedIn Pulse articles or Posts will embed a thumbnail image with a title, description, and link to your media in Wistia. LinkedIn does not support inline embedding of Wistia-hosted content in Posts or Pulse articles, so medias embedded there will not play inline on the LinkedIn feed.

Are you confused about why your domain restricted media won’t play on LinkedIn even though you’ve added linkedin.com to your allowlisted domains in Domain Restrictions?

Don’t worry, we were confused about this for a while too. But we figured it out!

To enable playback on LinkedIn while using Wistia domain restrictions, you’ll need to add cdn.embedly.com to your list of allowed domains on the Account > Settings > Account > Domain Restrictions section in Wistia. This is because LinkedIn uses Embed.ly to enable playback, so their CDN needs to be allowlisted in addition to linkedin.com.

To configure your media to start playing at a specific time, open the Share modal and navigate to the Share Link tab. Check the "Link to a specific time" option and enter a timestamp in the box to the right. You can also manually edit the timestamp directly in the URL.

The Copy Link and Thumbnail option allows you to share a direct media link along with a thumbnail and play button. When a viewer clicks on the thumbnail or link, they'll be redirected to the Wistia media page to watch the video. To copy your media's link and thumbnail:

You can share your podcast episodes to Facebook, Twitter, and other social media sites using a direct link. Click here to learn how to share your podcast episode!