I have an app that lets people post content to their LinkedIn page. What I want to do is create a button that I can include in an email that when clicked, will send the user to LinkedIn and open the box to share a post. What I would like to know is how to generate this url. What is the structure like? All the information I've found so far is about how to share a link to another website on LinkedIn, not how to direct a user to the share post box.
Example link: https://www.linkedin.com/share?id=0123456789
2010:
https://www.linkedin.com/cws/share?url={url}
2015:
https://www.linkedin.com/shareArticle?url={url}&title={title}&summary={text}&source={provider}
2020:
https://www.linkedin.com/sharing/share-offsite/?url={url}
Official Microsoft LinkedIn Share API Documentation. Of course, don't take our word for it! Any of the above URL formats will redirect to the 2020 URL format.
Use og:
tags in the <head>
block of your HTML! To quote the documentation, these should look like...
<meta property='og:title' content='Title of the article'/>
<meta property='og:image' content='//media.example.com/ 1234567.jpg'/>
<meta property='og:description' content='Description that will show in the preview'/>
<meta property='og:url' content='//www.example.com/URL of the article' />
Source: LinkedIn Share Documentation: Making Your Website Shareable on LinkedIn
That's the easy part! Take the URL you are sharing (i.e., example.com
, not linkedin.com?share=example.com
), and input it into the LinkedIn Post Inspector. You will be told everything that goes into determining how your webpage is shared on LinkedIn, from og:
tags to oEmbed
data.
Here's an online demo with share links to 20+ services. Check the source code and you can see first-hand how the share link for Linkedin works!
I have a more detailed answer elsewhere on the og:description
tag not displaying in the LinkedIn preview.
If you are interested in a regularly maintained GitHub project that keeps track of this so you don't have to, check it out! I'm a contributor! Social Share URLs