Question

It often shows no image or my profile picture as thumbnail on FB and Twitter instead of the picture from the first article. Even though my social media accounts are properly connected.

Examples:

Open	My first article contains an image but the tumbnail is my box image.
Open	My first article contains an image but there's no thumbnail.

Solution

Facebook and Twitter do provide tools to verify whether the metadata has been delivered correctly or not.

Simply enter the selection URL (for example https://thescope.com/comics/selection/51343) into the tool on the following pages:

Facebook: https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/

Twitter: https://cards-dev.twitter.com/validator

There is no such tool for LinkedIn.

The tools should resolve most image issues.

PS: There's no point in reconnecting the social media accounts. The selection appearing on the chosen channel (even with image problems) means the account/token is fine.

Background information: How does that even work with these images?

Which image will be selected?

If the first article contains an image, thats the image that will be selected.

If the first article doesn't contain an image, the box image will be selected. 

Every time you publish a selection there's a query going out to the social media provider. The query follows this pattern:

"Hello Twitter, please post the following content on the user timeline of the user ScopeKurator":

Zadie Smith liebt Comics. Plädoyer für Comickurzgeschichten. Libysche Convention gestürmt & mehr. https://thescope.com/comics/selection/51343

Twitter detects a URL in the selected tweet.

Twitter should use the metadata from the URL to create a decent thumbnail.

The metadata is always in the same format. It's up to Twitter how they prioritize the thumbnail creation. Especially when the image will be downloaded.

In many cases this will work right away but sometimes not at all.

At this point we have no control over the process. There are several assumptions why it does or doesn't work in some cases. The providers do not record the process.

Please note that the display of the thumbnails is generated locally and therefore there's a chance that different users see different images.