Social Sharing cover preview image

Sharing
1

When sharing via the Twitter button when social sharing is enabled or just copying/pasting the book URL into a social platform, there is no preview image (book cover) included in the post. It is just text.

Is there a plugin or option that will direct social platforms to utilize the book cover image as a preview?

Somewhat related observation… it appears that Pressbooks now only supports Twitter as an option for social sharing (no Facebook icon appears when social sharing option is enabled). In addition to Facebook, it might be nice to have an Instagram share option to take advantage of the sizeable “bookstagram” community.

2

I’d like to follow up on this query as it is still an issue we are unable to resolve. Is there a way that we can assign what image (the book cover) is associated with the book’s url when sharing to social media?

3

Thanks @toddhalvorsen these are good ideas, but we’re not actively working on them right now. Here’s a related issue in our backlog: Add support for Twitter Summary Cards when people click 'Share this book' twitter link · Issue #2196 · pressbooks/pressbooks · GitHub. Would love to work with you and others interested in this feature to understand your desires and expected outcomes and get something valuable for you into our product backlog. Some initial questions:

  1. what social media platforms do you want to be able to easily share into?
  2. where do you want to be able to share content from (in the Pressbooks interface)? i.e. book homepage, individual chapters, etc.
  3. what do you want the social shares to include/look like (include cover image, sample text, description of book, etc.)?
4

Thanks @SteelWagstaff for the reply.

  1. Our needs are limited primarily to Twitter and Facebook
  2. We would like readers to have the ability to share both individual chapters as well as the whole book
  3. Shares should include the cover image, title, brief description from the book description page. I’ve seen plugins for Drupal and Wordpress that specifically provide an input for a “social image” in their SEO options, (where in this case we would specify the book cover as that image). I’m not sure if it would be challenging to add this functionality directly to the Pressbooks interface.
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5

@SteelWagstaff I can only support @toddhalvorsen’s suggestion! :pray:

I would like to add that sharing on LinkedIn would also be appreciated in my institution.

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6

Hi @frenaville and @toddhalvorsen I’ve created a new feature idea in our ideas repo: Improve social sharing options · Issue #458 · pressbooks/ideas · GitHub. If you have anything further to add or suggest to help us refine and understand your desired outcome(s), please feel free to comment on the ticket there.

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