How do I setup social cards in my newsletter?

What is a social card?

A social card is the preview that shows up when someone shares a link to your newsletter on social media or in a chat app — the box with an image, a title, and a short description you’ve seen countless times on X, LinkedIn, Slack, iMessage, and Facebook.

Behind the scenes, the card is built from HTML meta tags (Open Graph and Twitter Card tags) on the public web version of your letter. When a link is pasted into a platform, it fetches the page, reads those tags, and builds the preview. Without a card, a shared link is plain text — easy to scroll past. With a good one, your story gets visual real estate and a better chance at a click.

Where social cards live in Letterhead

Social cards are set per letter — each letter has its own optional image, title, and preview text. There’s no channel-wide or template-level default; if you set nothing, the public letter page falls back to sensible defaults (see “What if I leave it blank?”).

Before you start

• Dimensions: 1200 × 630 px is the de-facto standard; X, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Slack all render it cleanly.
• File type: JPG for photos; PNG for crisp text or transparency.
• Size: under ~1 MB so previews load quickly.
• Text in the image: large and high-contrast — platforms downscale previews heavily.

A hosted image from the web works too — you just need its direct URL.

Set a social card on a letter

1. Open the letter and click Preview and schedule.
2. In the right-hand sidebar, scroll past the send-test, content-check, and Email Subject / Preview Text fields (those control the inbox preview, not the social card) to the SOCIAL CARD section. It has three fields: Image, Title (max 180 characters), and Preview text (max 180 characters).
3. Click the image placeholder to upload — from Local Files or a Direct Link — and use the built-in editing tools (crop, rotate, flip, light adjustments) before clicking Add.
4. Fill in the Title and Preview text. You have 180 characters each, but platforms truncate much earlier — put the hook in the first 60–80 characters of the title, and treat the preview text like a one-sentence subhead.

Changes save automatically, and you can edit these fields any time until you schedule or send.

Test your social card

• Facebook / Meta Sharing Debugger — https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/; paste your public letter URL and click Scrape Again.
• LinkedIn Post Inspector — https://www.linkedin.com/post-inspector/.
• Slack / iMessage — paste the link into your own DMs; both render Open Graph tags directly.
• X — draft a post with your URL and check the inline preview.

What if I leave it blank?

Each field falls back so a shared link always gets some preview:

• Title → the letter’s own title; failing that, the channel name.
• Preview text → the letter’s subtitle.
• Image → the first image in the letter body; if there are none, the channel’s logo.

Everyday sends get a workable card automatically. Set the fields explicitly when you want to control the framing — a tentpole story, a launch, or a sponsored send.

Removing or changing a card

Go back to the SOCIAL CARD section on the letter and clear or replace the field. If a platform cached the old preview, force a refresh (see below).

Troubleshooting

• Card hasn’t updated: platforms cache aggressively — use Facebook’s Scrape Again or append a dummy query string (?v=2) to bypass the cache.
• Image isn’t showing: confirm it’s publicly accessible, at least 200 × 200 px, and under platform caps (Facebook 8 MB, LinkedIn 5 MB).
• Wrong title or text: confirm the letter saved, then view source on the public URL and search for og:title.
• Title cut off: aim for ~60–70 characters (title) and ~150 (preview text).
• Upload won’t open: an ad-blocker may be interfering — disable it for this site or use Direct Link.

Still stuck? Reach out to support. Want readers to share directly from the email? Add a Social Share block.