© Ryan Pike | Dreamstime Stock Photos

When you include a URL within a status update on LinkedIn, there are pre-populated fields that appear below your status update.

So your status update can include the content you write in your update, plus content that is reflective of (and dependent on) the URL you are sharing.

It’s a great additional call to action and can expand and/or support the content visible in your status update.

Screen shot of a status update (Taken 23 August 2013)

These URL specific fields can be populated with an image, a header and a description dependent on:

• how the page the URL is pointing to is constructed, and/or
• whether it includes html metadata that optimises it to faciliate sharing on platforms like LinkedIn and Facebook (social metadata)

LinkedIn supports open graph tags, so if the social metadata has been set for page being shared, then when we share on LinkedIn https://developer.linkedin.com/documents/setting-display-tags-shares there will be accompanying information.

It is possible to edit the information accompanying the URL on LinkedIn.

You can:

• Edit the title accompanying the link
• Edit the description accompanying the link
• Select from images(s) recognised in the metadata or opt to not display an image

While we know the character limit of status updates, it’s harder to find the limit for the URL specific fields.

This format for displaying links is common across LinkedIn for individual status updates, group discussions, company status updates and university page updates. As someone who is posting across all of those elements, it’s handy to know roughly what you’re working with – especially if you’re dealing with a site not optimised for social sharing, where you might have to manually edit the title and description fields to make them more attractive and explanatory to people seeing the post.

I plugged in some Lipsum to see how many characters the title and description fields allow…and how much they truncate.

Title field

• Allows you to enter 200 characters: Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Donec eget vestibulum dui. Pellentesque dapibus elit tortor, eleifend ornare dui viverra in. Vestibulum sed ipsum varius, rutrum eros rutrum, v.
• When shared:
  • With image, it displays 67 characters.
  • Without image, it displays 67 characters.

Description field

• It let me enter 2 paragraphs of lipsum, or 1649 characters. It might have let me enter more, but 1649 characters is alot of effort as is (given the amount that is actually displayed)
• When shared:
  • With image, it displays 244 characters
  • Without image, it displays 244 characters

I took a snapshot of both status updates so you could see what they look like:

LinkedIn Status updates with the URL specific title and description fields edited – example with image and example without image (Taken 2 August 2013)

On images

You can’t upload an image for a LinkedIn post with a URL, it will pull in whatever is on the web page – hopefully the page is constructed so that the more relevant images are sucked in for display on LinkedIn.

While writing the post, showing the option to select from images and hide images (Taken 23 August 2013)

In terms of the decision to show/hide the image – there is no gain from hiding it in terms of additional characters from the URL title and description fields displaying.

Additionally, Dan Zarrella has indicated that on Facebook posts with photos in them perform better in terms of aggregating likes, comments and shares. While no measurement has been done specifically on LinkedIn, it’s possible this could also be true for posts on LinkedIn.

With nothing to gain in terms of additional characters, and the fact that posts images are possibly more likely to be engaged with than those without, opting to show the image preferable.