Preview your post

When you create or edit a post, Hootsuite displays a preview of it for each social account you’ve selected. As you work, the preview updates in real-time so you can see what your audiences will see.

Links

Previews are as accurate as possible, but some elements are finalized by the social network when the post is published. This can result in minor differences between the preview and final post.

Link previews, for example, generate automatically, but each social network pulls link preview information differently from the link’s website. This means that the resulting link preview for a given link may not be the same on each social network. Understand link preview results on each social network.

Images

Images can also publish with different results depending on the social network. Social networks accommodate image uploads in a wide range of dimensions and resolutions (see Image file requirements). Hootsuite will automatically compress images up to 20MB in size to meet the requirements of the social networks.

Note: The preview for Instagram may crop portrait images, but your published post will include the full image.

Images are optimized to look their best on each platform. Social networks make adjustments to best support the following:

• Fitting the allotted space.
• Rendering the image in multiple sizes.
• Displaying it optimally on all devices and screens.

Social networks are always testing new optimization methods, including image resizing, reformatting, scaling, and cropping. Because of this automatic image optimization, we recommend that you not place any overlaid text near the edges of your images.

Refer to the image upload recommendations from each social network if your image is published with unwanted adjustments:

• Facebook
• X
• Instagram
• LinkedIn

Learn how to edit images in Hootsuite.