Sometimes after updating an already published material, social media sites like Facebook or LinkedIn still load the old version. You may for example have corrected the headline, or changed the main image, but those changes are not taken into account when you share the material on social media.

This is typically because somebody has already shared your material on the social media site. On that occasion, the social media platform saved the original version of the material locally on their server. And now they fetch a preview of the content from there every time the same link is shared again, instead of loading the updated version from Mynewsdesk’s server.

Most of the time, you can refresh the presentation of the material on social media by sharing, or updating your social media post with a modified link – a URL that is different from the one that was shared previously, but still links to the same site. 

This can be achieved by simply adding /?, followed by a random character, at the very end of the link; for example: /?x
So e.g. for this page, instead of
help.mynewsdesk.com/en/faq/social-media-shows-old-version
you could share the following:
help.mynewsdesk.com/en/faq/social-media-shows-old-version/?x

Some social media platforms also offer specially designed debugger tools:
– For posts on Facebook, there is a specially designed Facebook Sharing Debugger tool, where you paste the URL for which you want to update the content, then click on debug.
– LinkedIn supplies a similar tool, the LinkedIn Post Inspector.
– X (Twitter) usually updates by itself (although it may take some time), but you can also try the Twitter Debugger Tool.
Using such debugger tools instead of tweaking the URL has the advantage that not only your post will show the updated content, but it will also impact future posts by other users of the social media platform.

Please also see:
How to publish a press release, news or blog post
Can I change a material after it has been published?
How to send already published content to more recipients