You had a vision of how your new Tweet will look, so you wrote the tweet text, added that breath-taking image you created, added a couple of hashtags, and submitted the tweet it to the world. Then, comes the “oh no” phase, when you notice that the tweet doesn’t really look like you intended.
In this tutorial we’ll explain how we can preview tweets before posting them, to make sure your tweets look exactly the way you intend.
Isn’t there a tool for that?
Well, yes, there is a tool for previewing tweets before posting them. You can use it to submit your tweet’s text, images, hashtags, links and retrieve an exact preview of the Tweet. The preview that is being generated is an exact preview of how your Tweet will look like, so you could make sure your tweets look exactly as you want them to look, before posting them on Twitter. The tool has a free plan, so give it a try.
Why should I preview a tweet before posting it?
When submitting a tweet, the actual tweet doesn’t necessarily look the same as you saw in the editor. It may happen because:
- If you include a link in the tweet, Twitter may decide to replace the URL with the page’s title, preview image, and potentially a short text description.
- When posting an image, Twitter may decide to crop it.
- The amount of words per row is different between different devices (mobile/tablet/desktop) and screen resolutions.
- If you posted a long URL, it may be shortened automatically by Twitter, using services such as bit.ly.
As you can see below, the image is cropped only after the tweet is submitted. The importance of having a preview of the tweet is to avoid such cases, where the Tweet changes slightly (or more than that) after you submit it to the world.
Preview a tweet with a YouTube link
When you post a YouTube link on Twitter, it will automatically be transformed into a card. That card will usually contain a screenshot from the video, the title of the video, and its description.
To preview the YouTube link card before tweeting it, you can use Twitter’s card validator. All you have to do is just submit the URL of the video, and the tool will generate the preview for you automatically.
Preview a tweet with a WordPress blog post link
When you post a link to a WordPress blog post on Twitter, it will automatically be transformed into a card. That card will usually contain the blog post’s title and description (from the card markups) and the featured image of the blog post.
To preview the WordPress post’s card before tweeting it, you can use Twitter’s card validator. All you have to do is just submit the URL of the blog post, and the tool will generate the preview for you automatically.
Preview a tweet with text, image, or video
Twitter provides a tool for previewing link-based tweets, but unfortunately, it doesn’t provide a tool for previewing text, image, or video-based tweets.
Therefore, the recommended way to preview your tweet is to create a test account on Twitter and submit the tweet with that test account, before submitting it with your real account. Once you got everything looking ok, you can delete that tweet and re-submit it with your real Twitter account.
This may not be the solution you were looking for, but unfortunately, Twitter doesn’t currently provide a better way to preview the final look and feel of tweets before submitting them.
Summarizing how to preview a tweet before posting it
Previewing tweets You can preview your tweets on Twitter in several ways, depending on the content of the tweet:
- If the tweet is text/image/video based, you can create a test account and submit the tweet there first, to preview it.
- If the tweet is link-based (YouTube link, WordPress blog post link, or any other link), you can use Twitter’s card validator to preview the tweet.
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