Wistia and Social Sharing
Social Media can drive some serious ROI if done right. Vehicles like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn can be used to spread a business message effectively, especially if delivered in a way that’s easy to consume and share. The best way to do that is with media - it’s perfect for social media attention spans, so it tends to ’travel' better than blocks of text. Now that you’ve got your media uploaded to Wistia, how do you share it and track the performance on Social Media sites? This page will help. The three services we’re focused on here are Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. If you’re not using these platforms (or you are!) and you want to share your media through other methods, such as in an email, you can use Copy Link and Thumbnail to paste the thumbnail of your media. When clicked, viewers will be directly taken to your media in Wistia!
Twitter is, frankly, the bee’s knees. Sharing Wistia medias in Twitter is super easy. Check out how below.
Sharing Wistia Content from Your Account With Twitter Cards
Twitter’s Twitter Card functionality is pretty slick - you can play media from accepted sites inside of the Twitter stream. Super useful, as it doesn’t require leaving the Twitter stream to view your media. Well guess who got Twitter Card approval? That’s right. We did!
So, you’re asking, how can I take advantage of this awesome-ness? Here we go:
Open up the media in your account that you want to share in your Twitter feed. Select Embed & Share.
In the Embed & Share modal, select the Social Sharing tab at the top. If you don’t have a description for your media yet, you should fill one in before sharing. Descriptions show up on the Twitter cards, which makes them pretty useful for setting context for your viewers and piquing their interest.
After you click the Tweet button, the Twitter modal will appear (you may be asked to login). The default tweet text is the name of the media and the description.
Once you confirm that you want to tweet the link out, check your feed! It’s like Christmas morning, except instead of presents you get your media content in your Twitter feed.
If you have a Turnstile or form on your video, Twitter will not allow viewers to submit the form when viewing the video on their Twitter timeline. They’ll need to click the link and open the Wistia media page to submit the form.
Keep in mind, a user will have to hit play on the media in their feed, but that magical media treat will play right inline once they do so.
When you add the link to your Wistia media to Facebook, it will automatically embed a thumbnail for viewers to click. When your followers click on the thumbnail image, it will take them to the media page of your Wistia account.
First, open the media in your account and make sure it has a description! If it doesn’t currently have a description, hover under the title and select Add a Description to get started.
Select Embed & Share. In the Embed & Share window, select the Share Link option at the top.
Copy the URL from the Link box, and enter it in Facebook’s Status Update. The media thumbnail and description will be pulled in and ready to share!
Once you share the update, the media thumbnail will appear instantly in the Facebook news feed.
Updating Your Thumbnail or Media Title on Facebook
Sometimes you’re just not happy with the thumbnail that displays for your media, it happens to all of us. So you head to the Customize panel and update that beautiful thumbnail. Super easy, right?
But when you go to Facebook the new information doesn’t show up for your media no matter how many times you reload the page or repost the media. Bummer!
Stay calm, media friend. The good news is that we’ve got a solution: The Facebook Debugger!
The Facebook Debugger allows you to input your media’s URL so that Facebook will re-scrape it for its metadata (like the media thumbnail and title). 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. OG tags include your thumbnail, as well as things like the title and description.
The problem with updating your media information is that Facebook will only automatically re-scrape this information every 30 days. When you put your media’s URL into the Facebook Debugger, you are letting Facebook know that it should re-scrape your media’s metadata. This will update its cache for your media and display all your brand new information. 👍
Posting to Facebook from Your Website
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 Project 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:
<meta property="og:xxxxxx" content="...">
(there should be ~8 of these tags)
Here’s a screenshot:
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 then share the URL of that page on Facebook.
You’re good to go!
LinkedIn currently accepts Wistia link & thumbnail embeds within some areas of its platform, specifically Posts and LinkedIn Pulse Articles. Embedding Wistia medias 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. Something like: https://private-sharing.wistia.com/medias/z18mbi6ve1
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.
Domain Restrictions and LinkedIn
Are you confused about why your domain restricted media won’t play on LinkedIn even though you’ve added linkedin.com to your allowlisted domains in Domain Restrictions?
Don’t worry, we were confused about this for a while too. But we figured it out!
To enable playback on LinkedIn while using Wistia domain restrictions, you’ll need to add cdn.embedly.com to your list of allowed domains on the Account > Settings > Account > Domain Restrictions section in Wistia. This is because LinkedIn uses Embed.ly to enable playback, so their CDN needs to be allowlisted in addition to linkedin.com.
Link to a Specific Time
Want your media to start a specific time? Leo’s here to help!
To share your media at a specific time navigate to the Embed and Share modal. In the Embed & Share window, select the Share Link option at the top. Under the URL you’ll see an option to “Link to a specific time.” Clicking the box will automatically link to wherever you’ve paused the media. You can also manually edit the time stamp.
Copy Link and Thumbnail
Copy Link and Thumbnail allows you to essentially copy the thumbnail of the media itself (along with the play button), and includes a link back to the media’s media page in Wistia. When a viewer clicks to watch the media, they’ll be taken to view it right in Wistia! In order to copy the link and thumbnail of your media, you’ll want to:
- Head to your media’s media page in Wistia.
- Right-click within the media.
- In the Context Menu that pops up, select Copy link and thumbnail.
- Paste the code where you would like viewers to see the thumbnail, and you’re all set!