How to Preview a LinkedIn Post

There’s nothing worse than hitting ‘Post’ on LinkedIn only to see your carefully crafted update appear with a broken link, a bizarrely cropped image, or an embarrassing typo. Your post’s preview is the first, and sometimes only, chance you get to capture your audience’s attention, and a botched preview can undermine your message before it’s even read. This guide breaks down exactly how to preview your LinkedIn posts effectively, covering native options, clever workarounds, and best practices to make sure every post you publish looks exactly as you intended.

Why Previewing Your LinkedIn Post is Non-Negotiable

In the fast-scrolling world of professional networking, first impressions are everything. Skipping the preview step is a gamble that rarely pays off. Here’s why taking a few extra moments to check your work is so important for building your personal or company brand.

First Impressions Drive Credibility

Think of your post’s preview as its virtual handshake. A clean, professional preview - with a clear image, a compelling headline, and typo-free text - signals credibility and attention to detail. Conversely, a post with a stretched image, a missing link preview, or garbled text can make your content look unprofessional and untrustworthy, causing your network to scroll right past.

Maximizing Click-Throughs and Engagement

The goal of many LinkedIn posts is to drive action, whether it’s getting someone to click a link to your latest blog post, watch a video, or download a resource. A visually appealing and accurate preview directly influences this. An intriguing image and title in a link preview invite clicks, while broken elements create friction and hesitation. Great previews get more engagement, signaling to the LinkedIn algorithm that your content is valuable.

Maintaining Brand Consistency

Every piece of content you share contributes to your overall brand image. Previewing helps you maintain visual and tonal consistency. Does the image reflect your brand’s aesthetic? Is the formatting clean and easy to read? Answering these questions before you publish prevents you from sharing sloppy-looking content that damages the professional brand you’ve worked so hard to build.

Optimizing for Desktop and Mobile Feeds

Over half of LinkedIn’s engagement happens on mobile devices, where content is displayed differently than on a desktop. Text can get cut off in unexpected places, and images might be cropped awkwardly. What looks perfect on your large monitor might be a mess on a smaller phone screen. A proper preview process includes checking how your post will render on different devices to provide a seamless experience for your entire audience.

The Native LinkedIn Preview: What You See is *Almost* What You Get

LinkedIn does offer a live preview directly within its post composer, which is a great starting point. As you type and add media, the composer updates in real-time to give you a general idea of the final look. However, it’s not always a 100% accurate representation, especially when it comes to links and device-specific formatting.

Step-by-Step: Previewing as You Create

1. Start a post and add your text: As you write your copy, you can see how paragraphs break and how your text flows. While LinkedIn doesn’t offer native bolding or italics in the post composer for profiles, you can use third-party text formatters and paste the text in a way that often retains the formatting. Always check how this looks, as rendering can be inconsistent.
2. Attach your media (images or video): When you upload a photo or video, LinkedIn immediately shows a preview thumbnail. This is your first clue for potential cropping issues. Taller vertical images often get cropped into a square or horizontal preview in the feed, potentially cutting off key parts of the visual. Click on the image preview to adjust the crop and alt-text if necessary.
3. Paste your link and wait: This is the most common point of failure. When you paste a URL into the composer, LinkedIn’s servers "scrape" the page to fetch preview information. After a few seconds, a link preview card should appear, pulling a title, description, and image from the destination page. If this card looks wrong - or doesn’t appear at all - it’s a red flag that requires immediate attention.

Mastering the LinkedIn Link Preview: Going Beyond the Basics

The dreaded broken link preview is one of the most common and frustrating LinkedIn issues. Understanding why it happens is the first step to fixing and preventing it for good.

Why Do Link Previews Break?

When you share a link, LinkedIn looks for specific metadata embedded in the webpage’s code called Open Graph (OG) tags. These tags tell social platforms how a shareable link should be displayed. The most important ones for LinkedIn are:

• og:title: The headline that appears in the preview.
• og:description: The short summary text below the title.
• og:image: The image that appears in the card.
• og:url: The canonical URL of the page.

If these tags are missing, configured incorrectly, or if the og:image is too small or the wrong dimensions, LinkedIn can’t generate a proper preview. Instead, it might show a blank box, pull a random logo from your website’s footer, or display a garbled line of text.

Furthermore, LinkedIn caches (or saves) the data from a link the first time it’s shared. If you shared a link with a bad preview, then fixed the OG tags on your website, pasting the link again might still show you the old, broken preview because LinkedIn is pulling from its memory. You need a way to force a refresh.

How to Fix and Test Your Link Previews with the Post Inspector

Thankfully, LinkedIn provides a free and powerful tool to diagnose and solve these issues: the Post Inspector. Treat this tool as your mandatory final checkpoint for any link you plan on sharing.

Here’s how to use it:

1. Navigate to the LinkedIn Post Inspector.
2. Paste the URL of your blog post or webpage into the input field.
3. Click the “Inspect” button.

The Post Inspector will show you exactly how the link preview will appear on LinkedIn. More importantly, it provides detailed information about the OG tags it found and highlights any errors, such as a missing image or a description that’s too long. Using this tool also clears LinkedIn’s cache for that URL. So if you had an old, broken preview, inspecting it will force LinkedIn to re-scrape the page and fetch the updated OG tag information. The next time you paste that link in a post composer, the correct preview will appear.

Pro Tip: As a rule, run every new blog post or landing page URL through the Post Inspector the moment it goes live. This ensures you catch any preview issues before you or anyone else on your team attempts to share it.

The Mobile vs. Desktop View: Catching Formatting Faux Pas

A post that’s beautifully formatted with strategic line breaks on a desktop can look like a wall of text on a mobile device. Spacing is handled differently, and character limits for visible text ("see more..." link) are shorter on mobile. It’s vital to know how your message appears on the smaller screen.

Simulating the Mobile View Before You Publish

Checking the mobile view used to require guesswork, but there are a couple of reliable methods to see what your audience will experience.

Method 1: The “Send to Yourself” Trick

This low-tech method is surprisingly effective. Once you’ve drafted your post on desktop - text, hashtags, and all - don’t hit 'Post.' Instead:

1. Copy the entire text of your draft.
2. Send it to yourself via a messaging app accessible on your phone (like Slack, iMessage, or even an email to yourself).
3. Save any planned media (images/videos) to your phone’s camera roll.
4. Open the LinkedIn mobile app, start a new post, paste the text from your messages, and add the media.

You can now see a near-perfect preview of how the post will appear in the LinkedIn mobile compose box. Pay close attention to line breaks and where the “…see more” cut-off happens. This is the best way to dial in formatting that looks great on any screen.

Method 2: Using Browser Developer Tools (Advanced)

For those comfortable with a more technical approach, desktop browsers have built-in tools to simulate a mobile experience. In browsers like Google Chrome or Firefox:

1. Go to the LinkedIn homepage.
2. Right-click anywhere on the page and select “Inspect.”
3. In the developer panel that opens, look for an icon that looks like a small phone and tablet (often called the “Toggle device toolbar”).
4. Clicking it will shrink the webpage to a mobile viewport. You can even choose specific device models like an “iPhone 12” from a dropdown menu to see how your content might appear on different screen sizes.

While this method gives you a general idea, using the LinkedIn app on your actual phone usually provides the most accurate mobile preview.

The Foolproof Workflow: Creating a “Draft” Environment

LinkedIn doesn’t have a built-in “drafts” feature for personal profiles, which is a major pain point for content creators who want to perfect their posts before they go live. But with a bit of creativity, you can create your own private testing ground.

The Private LinkedIn Group Method

This is by far the best way to get a true, live preview of a post without publishing it to your entire network. It lets you see how link previews, videos, and multi-image posts will actually render in the feed.

1. Create a New Group: Navigate to the “Groups” section on LinkedIn and create a new group. Name it something like “My Content Previews.”
2. Set it to Private: In the group settings, make sure the group is “Unlisted.” This means no one can discover it by searching for it, members must be invited. Don’t invite anyone else.
3. Post Your Drafts: Now, you can post your draft content into this group. It will function exactly like the main LinkedIn feed. You can test video playback, check your link previews with 100% accuracy, and see how different formats look.
4. Copy and Publish: Once you’re completely happy with how a post looks in your private group, simply copy the text and recreate the post on your personal profile or company page. Then, delete the draft from the group to keep it clean.

This workflow removes all the guesswork. You publish with the confidence of knowing exactly what your network is going to see, every single time.

Final Thoughts

Mastering the LinkedIn preview isn’t about being overcautious, it’s about respecting your audience’s time and maintaining a professional standard that builds brand trust. By using dedicated tools like the Post Inspector, being mindful of mobile formatting, and creating a private test environment, you can elevate your posting strategy from hoping for the best to publishing with complete confidence.

Speaking of confidence, building a seamless and reliable social media workflow is exactly why we created Postbase. We were tired of the uncertainty that came with outdated schedulers and desperately wanted a true preview of what our content would look like on mobile and desktop. Our platform gives you a clean, accurate post composer that previews exactly how your content will appear on LinkedIn - and all your other social channels. It streamlines your entire content process, from planning on a beautiful visual calendar to engaging with your audience, so you can focus on building your brand instead of fighting your tools.