Artboost is a growing art platform that aims to make art affordable and accessible for everyone. They automated the creation of social share images for their whole content with us: 30k+ pages featuring art, artists and collections!
We love what Artboost achieved with Placid and want to share the why, what and how with you.
In case you don’t know who we are: Placid is a tool for social share image automation. We make websites look awesome when they’re shared on Facebook, Twitter or Pinterest. Learn more
Why Artboost needed help
A marketplace like Artboost deals with multiple thousand ever-changing products. To promote and share them on social media, all those products need social share images to grab people’s attention in their feeds.
A page without social share images looks like this when shared on Facebook and Twitter:
The link previews don't show a thumbnail per default. Facebook sometimes does grab a random image from the page to display, but most of the times it's either cut off weirdly, or super small.
To avoid having link previews look like this, you need to tell the social networks which images to use. This can be done by defining Open Graph and Twitter Card images in the metadata of each page.
Open Graph images are used by almost every social network (LinkedIn, messengers,..) to build their link previews. Only Twitter uses their own Twitter Card images.
Ideally, your link previews would look like this:
(Spoiler alert: This is how the share images of Artboost look like right now!)
Link previews with nice thumbnails will get more attention and engagement. But creating these images manually in Photoshop or Canva isn’t feasible for a growing marketplace with 30k+ pages like Artboost.
So Mikkel, the CEO of Artboost was looking for a solution that would automate these images for them without looking crappy. They should represent their platform: modern, unique, attention to detail. As a fellow designer, he had his own vision of how they should look like.
We know how he felt, because we were in a similar situation when we started to build Placid as a solution for our own projects.
What Placid does for Artboost
The Artboost team set up Placid to automatically create the share images for their whole site. Mikkel designed a few different templates with our editor that he embedded on artboost.com.
These templates use content from Artboost's pages – images and text – to make custom images for every page.
Share Images for Collections
Share Images for Artworks
Share Images for Artists
The images mainly show the beautiful contemporary artworks that artists sell on artboost.com. But there’s also additional info generated onto the share images, like the name of an artwork or collection, the Artboost branding or a call to action.
All of these images are newly created every time an artist adds an artwork, or a new artwork gets added to a collection. They reflect the latest changes of the site.
We think they represent the artworks really well, and are happy to see Placid generate new, beautiful images for Artboost every day 💙
If you want share images like Artboost, we can help you achieve the same on your site.