We use a lot of tools.
But, there’s one tool that you probably don’t use regularly.
It’s called LinkedIn Post Inspector.
And, there’s a reason why growth hackers like us should pay more attention to it.
In this quick guide, we’ll give you the lowdown on how the tool works, and show you how to use to it’s fullest.
You ready to hack some growth today?
Let’s go!
What is Post Inspector?
We like the LinkedIn post inspector tool because you can use it to find out exactly how LinkedIn views the links that you want to put out.
Its most basic use is to check for article previews and some growth hackers use it to find out the last time LinkedIn updated its links.
It’s pretty versatile and it shows things from a developer’s perspective.
The other great thing about it is that it’s an internal tool. This means you can trust it since it has access to the code and algorithms that the platform uses.
Tool Uses
Curious about other growth hacking tools that we use at BAMF? Find out which one you should be using in this guide.
The LinkedIn Post Inspector comes in handy when you want to find out if there’s data missing from a link that you want to post. This comes in handy during optimization.
Nothing is more annoying than having incomplete data in the links that you want to share. This metadata allows sites to communicate and display data correctly.
When you know what’s missing, you’ll know what to add so that you come up with better previews.
The old saying, “don’t judge a book by its cover,” doesn’t apply to social media platforms such as LinkedIn. You could miss out on a prospect landing on a great piece of content on your site if your preview doesn’t do it any justice.
If you already have a link on LinkedIn, but you ended updating the content on that link, you can use the LinkedIn Post Inspector to check if the platform has updated their data scrape and preview it.
If something went wrong, you can individually check each field and see what you can do to fix it.
Does It Accept Any Link?
Definitely.
It can pull out the metadata on anything that you want to share on LinkedIn, including URLs on their platform as well.
So be it videos, your homepage, a landing page, articles, it can easily pull a preview.
How to Use LinkedIn Post Inspector
Using the tool is pretty straightforward.
First of all, you want to head over to the LinkedIn Post Inspector tool, and insert the URL you want to check out in the field provided.
After that, click “Inspect”
Give it a second to do its magic and it will take you to a new screen that will show you its analysis.
You’ll first be greeted with a preview of what the post looks like.
As you can see, our example link’s featured image is slightly cut off at the bottom since it was optimized for our site.
If you remember, we released an article on ideal LinkedIn post sizes, so keep that in mind if you want your featured image to fit perfectly in the preview.
It will also show you what title pops up and of course the domain of where the link is from. Naturally, this blog post is on our main domain bamf.com.
Once you start scrolling down you’ll get other details such as the URL information section.
This section shows you the date it was last scraped, this gives you an idea of how the post snippet looks if you made edits to the original link.
You’ll also get the fetched and canonical URL, along with the redirect trails if there are any.
Then you have the usual analysis such as the title tag, media type, image URL (this can come in handy), the meta description, author, and publish date (unfortunately, that wasn’t filled out right).
If you click on any of these fields, it will give you a more detailed description of what they do and how LinkedIn pulled the data from the link.
In this example, we clicked on the description and it pulled out alternate values that were considered.
Takeaways
There are a lot of tools that you can use in your quest for growth hacking, but sometimes the most simple tools can help you the most.
Also, here’s what.
Don’t underestimate the power of previews.
Little optimizations can make or break the other little things that you do on the platform.
Make sure you cover each and every detail.
It’s the detail-oriented growth hacker that scores the most deals.
