Publicize: Sharing to LinkedIn produces the incorrect card format on LinkedIn

[pauljacobson]

This is a report from 1267130-zen, a follow-up on 1238054-zen.

The user is querying why sharing posts to LinkedIn produces a "card" that doesn't feature the post's featured image as prominently as if you share it directly on LinkedIn?

Steps to reproduce

1. The user connected their site to LinkedIn with Publicize.
2. The user subsequently upgraded to the WordPress.com Business plan (with plugins).
3. The user created posts, and shared them to LinkedIn using Publicize.
4. The theme didn't support different post formats.

What I expected

The user expected shared posts to be formatted using the same "card" as if they shared the posts natively on LinkedIn. Here's an example of such a "natively" shared post:

What happened instead

They noticed that since upgrading to the WordPress.com Business plan, sharing to LinkedIn produced a different "card" format that doesn't feature the featured image as prominently. Here's an example:

Browser / OS version

Not relevant.

Context / Source

My initial feedback to the user was the following:

The reason for this is that your theme has limited support for WordPress post formats. Themes that support a broader variety of post formats offer opportunities to share bolder previews of posts on social media.

For example, a theme that supports an Image post format, may enable you to publish the sort of preview you produce when you publish the link directly on LinkedIn. Here is a discussion about this on LinkedIn from a few years ago: Using post formats: WordPress Essential Training.

While this does seem to be a valid consideration, I subsequently tested sharing from a WordPress.com Business plan site (with plugins) to LinkedIn using the Image and Standard post formats, and using a different theme: Cubic.

In both tests, I was able to reproduce the "card" that the user queried, not the better formatted version you see when posting directly on LinkedIn. When I shared my test post directly on LinkedIn.com, it resulted in this format:

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