Site Settings: Need More Clarification

There are two areas that have little to no explanation as to how to use them properly:

  1. Sharing - Shared Image
    A. The description shows an example image about “bicycles” with the “card” information. However it’s not clear where the info part of the card is generated. Does Sparkle create the info section (where it shows sparkleapp.com) or do you have to build that INTO the image file itself?

B. What are the image dimensions supposed to be?
C. Maximum file size?
D. File type?

  1. Local Business - Images
    Again this section has a place to add “images” with no explanation of how to use it.

A. Is the “shared image” supposed to be in this list?
B. Is there specific metadata that is supposed to be built into images in this list?
C. Are you supposed to choose images used in the site or something else?

Please add clarification to these settings as there is NONE in the current user guide.

These two areas are not directly Sparkle features, they are more about external services Sparkle integrates with. Hard to document a moving target.

Social sharing of an image for each page has no fixed specification, because it depends on the social network using the image. This includes Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Slack and who knows what else.

Facebook tends to favor a 1200x630 jpeg image, with a limit of 8MB (but the smaller the better).

The non-image portion of the card is based on the page title and description. You can get a facebook preview of your page by plugging the page address into their social graph debugger:

Local business is a feature completely unrelated to social sharing. I don’t suggest you use this unless your website represents a physical location. “local” is Google jargon for “a place on a map people can go to”, e.g. a pizza place.

Google in theory uses that information to enrich a map, showing a photo next to a location listing, and other details such as business hours, etc. (The “in theory” part is because it’s unclear whether they use this, and everybody fills in the “My Business” part of Google maps as well).

That was the core piece missing that was not understood, that these are not Sparkle-controlled features.

This totally changes my strategy on setting up the Facebook campaign and is 100% helpful.

I wish there were a guide that explained what sparkle actually does versus what it’s attempting to integrate with in third party social media apps. Maybe one day when I have enough money and time I’ll make that guide. Haha

Cheers, thx.