Skip to main content
Wistia and Social Sharing

Sharing videos to social media platforms is an effective option for delivering easily consumable content to your audience.

Katie avatar
Written by Katie
Updated over a week ago

Video content is perfect for social media attention spans and tends to travel better than blocks of text. Now that you’ve uploaded your media to Wistia, you can share it to social media platforms like Facebook, X, and LinkedIn. If you’re not using these platforms and you want to share your media through other methods, such as in an email, you can use the Copy Link and Thumbnail option to paste the thumbnail of your media.

X (Formerly Twitter)

Sharing Wistia Media Links to X

X's Twitter Card functionality allows viewers to play your Wistia video directly in their timeline. On the Overview page for your desired media, click the blue Share button to open the Share Link tab. You may also copy and paste your media link directly in a new X post.

Select the X option to automatically draft a post with your video's link, title, and thumbnail.

Note

Ensure that your media's folder is unlocked before sharing publicly.

Viewers can then click play and watch your video directly in their X feed.

Facebook

Select the Facebook option in the Share modal to post your media's link and thumbnail to your timeline.

Once shared, viewers who click on the thumbnail will be redirected to the public media page to watch your video.

Note

Looking to have your Wistia medias play inline on Facebook? Check out our Publish to Social page!

Updating Your Thumbnail or Media Title on Facebook

Does your media's title, description, or thumbnail appear to be out of date in your Facebook post? 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. However, Facebook only automatically re-scrapes this information every 30 days. Enter your media URL in the Facebook Debugger to prompt Facebook to re-scrape the metadata and display updated information.

Posting to Facebook from Your Website

Note

You're entering technical territory. We recommend having developer resources or experience before diving in.

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 approximately 8 tags as shown below.

<meta property="og:xxxxxx" content="...">

OG tags

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 share the page URL to Facebook.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn currently accepts Wistia link and thumbnail embeds in posts and Pulse Articles. Embedding Wistia media 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.

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.

Tip

Made a change to your media such as updating title or thumbnail, and LinkedIn is still showing the old version? Not to worry, just pop that media URL into the LinkedIn Post Inspector and LI will re-scrape the video for the latest metadata.

Note

Looking to have your Wistia medias play inline on LinkedIn? Check out our Publish to Social page!

Domain Restrictions and LinkedIn

To enable playback on LinkedIn with Domain Restrictions enabled, you’ll need to add cdn.embedly.com to your list of allowed domains in your Wistia account settings. Because LinkedIn uses Embed.ly for video playback, this domain needs to be allowlisted in addition to linkedin.com.

Note

Heads up, there is one caveat to using Embed.ly to bypass domain restrictions for LinkedIn. Adding Embed.ly to the list means that your medias will be able to embedded anywhere that uses Embed.ly to enable embedding.

Link to a Specific Time

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.

Copy Link and Thumbnail

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:

  1. Open the media page in Wistia.

  2. Right-click anywhere on the media.

  3. Select Copy link and thumbnail in the context menu.

  4. Paste the code in an email, landing page, or other sharing method.

Note

Depending on the platform, you may need to paste the Copy link and thumbnail code into an HTML box for the thumbnail to render correctly.

Sharing Podcast Episodes

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

Did this answer your question?