In the content builder, you can add links to an email that allow your contacts to share your email content with their friends on social networks, such as Facebook and Twitter.
Note: Dynamic content and personalization reflect the original contact when posted to a social network.
How it works
The following example describes what happens when a contact shares your email to Facebook:
- The contact clicks the Facebook link in the body of the email.
- The contact is taken to a page in Facebook where they confirm what they want to post.
- Once the contact clicks Post to Profile, the item displays in the News Feed on the front page of all of their friends.
- The initial contact's friends can click the link and view the original email as a web page. Friends can repeat the process and share the email with all of their friends.
- The original contact (the sharer) can also see what they posted in their own mini-feed on their profile page.
Add social network links
You can insert the current social network icons (or chicklets) by using the Insert Social Network Share button in the content editor.
- Open the email.
- Click into the email body, then click the Insert Social Network Share icon.
- Select one or more social networks and click Insert.
- You can change the text in the label field.
- You can configure some of the social network settings.
- Do one of the following steps:
- If you select Facebook, you can enter a Facebook description.
- If you select Twitter, you can enter a default Tweet, show the account that provided the message, and allow contacts to follow the account on Twitter. You can also recommend additional accounts for contacts to follow.
On the screen where you add share-to-social links to your email, the message notes that you use for internal purposes in your email are displayed as the Facebook description. That text is visible on Facebook. Before you send the email, make sure that you are comfortable publicly displaying that content.
When you test the Facebook Publish feature, if you use a personal account with privacy settings enabled, you receive an authorization error when you try to sync over the Facebook account to Campaign. Instead, test with a new or test Facebook account to see this feature. You can change your Facebook account to be completely public. If you change your Facebook account privacy settings, it might expose your Facebook account to the public.
Due to a limitation of the Facebook API, you can't use the Share-to-Social feature to "Like" a single element within an email.
Create a custom share-to-social link
Campaign supports the most popular social networks where you can share your emails. For social networks that are not supported, you can insert a tracked link to the email template.
Reporting capabilities for this feature are limited and track only the number of click-to-shares.
- Get the "sharing" URL from the social network site for which you want to create a custom share-to-social link. Use the sharing URL to post or share content to that social network.
Example 1: Sharing URLs for the StumbleUpon social network
http://www.stumbleupon.com/submit?url=www.xyz.com/example - To find your specific domain information go to Settings > Administration > Organization settings > Domain settings.
- Add "links" to the beginning of your domain. For example, links.your_domain_name.com.
- Complete the custom link in the following example by replacing the URL reference in the social network sharing URL from Example 1 with the custom click-to-view syntax from Example 2.
Example 2: Custom share-to-social Link for StumbleUpon for pod 1
http://www.stumbleupon.com/submit?url=http://links.your_domain_name/servlet/MailView%3fm=%%MAILING_ID%%%26r=%%CONTACT_ID%%%26j=%%JOB_ID_CODE%%%26mt=1%26rt=0"
You are now ready to add the custom link to your email.
Customize Facebook share description, title, and image
Facebook uses the open graph protocol to add hidden data to their web pages that, when shared on the social networking site, the post is populated with the specified text or images. You can add the Open Graph information in your email to tell Facebook what description, title and preview images to display in the Facebook post.
To tell Facebook how to share the correct information, place the following code in the <head> section of the email template
<meta property='og:title' content='Here's the title of my share!'/> <meta property='og:image' content='https://www.google.com/intl/en_com/images/srpr/logo3w.png'/> <meta property='og:description' content='Here's a description for Facebook that will show as a block of text!'/>
This is what your share-to-social URL should look like for Facebook.
https://www.facebook.com/sharer/sharer.php?u=http://google.com/
The first part of the link tells Facebook that you want to share something. The part after u=
is the URL that Facebook is to share.
Example
This creates a link that has the Facebook Sharer URL and appends the location of the S2S published page:
https://www.facebook.com/sharer/sharer.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fcontenta.mkt1042.com%2Fmson%2F2011%2F12%2F07%2FRFPK9wxCPNfc%2Findex.html
The URL encodes everything after u=
according to the instructions from Facebook. The Facebook Sharer goes to that page and figures out what you want shared or decides for you. Then, if Facebook sees the Open Graph tags, it uses those tags. If Facebook doesn't seen the Open Graph tags, it tries to determine what you want.
Troubleshooting Facebook share-to-social
If Facebook doesn't display the share as you believe it should, complete the following steps. You need the sent email that contains the share link, and you must log in to Facebook.
- Click the share-to-social Facebook link. The browser address bar displays the Facebook Sharer URL with the email appended after
u=
- Highlight and copy the encoded URL, starting with the
http
- On the Facebook Debugger website, paste the URL in the Input URL field and click Debug. The Object Properties for the page displays.
- Click Fetched URL. This URL is the published share-to-social version of the email that Facebook scrapes.
- Go to the source code of the page. If it does not have the open graph
<meta>
tags in the<head>
section of the source code, Facebook guesses what to place for the preview image, title, and description. This causes issues if you want to have control over their message and because the information that is shared by default is misleading.
Enter special or international language characters in Pinterest description field
Use HTML encoding to enter special characters in the Description field for Pinterest.
If you don't know how to code HTML, you can search the Internet for "Text to HTML Converters" to find an HTML conversion tool.
In this example, you want to add the Czech translation for "Measure twice, cut once" in the Description field:
Dvakrát měř, jednou řež
- Using a Text to HTML converter (select the Encode characters option), you add the original saying to the converter.
- The converter generates HTML encoding text. The saying becomes:
Dvakrát měř, jednou řež
Troubleshooting
Known error for emails with share-to-social links
You need to fix these items before you can send your mailing: An unexpected error occurred. If the problem continues, contact your system administrator.
This typically means an element is missing from your share-to-social link. Make sure your HTML code includes the URL and the link name. Also, if you see xt="SPSNCLICK"
, it must be paired with xtsn="..."
. Check every share-to-social type link and make sure that it is set up correctly.
To see a full example, create an email and use the share-to-social feature or the link type for social networks from the link building menu.
The following list includes the social networks that Campaign supports and the corresponding xtsn
value:
- Bebo:
href="#SPSNCLICK" xtsn="BB" xt="SPSNCLICK"
- Delicious:
href="#SPSNCLICK" xtsn="DL" xt="SPSNCLICK"
- Digg:
href="#SPSNCLICK" xtsn="DG" xt="SPSNCLICK"
- Facebook:
href="#SPSNCLICK" xtsn="FA" xt="SPSNCLICK"
- Facebook Like/Recommend:
href="#SPSNCLICK" xtsn="FL" xt="SPSNCLICK"
- Foursquare:
href="#SPSNCLICK" xtsn="FS"
- Hyves:
href="#SPSNCLICK" xtsn="HY" xt="SPSNCLICK"
- MySpace:
href="#SPSNCLICK" xtsn="MS" xt="SPSNCLICK"
- Reddit:
href="#SPSNCLICK" xtsn="RD" xt="SPSNCLICK"
- StumbleUpon:
href="#SPSNCLICK" xtsn="SU" xt="SPSNCLICK"
- Twitter:
href="#SPSNCLICK" xtsn="TW" xt="SPSNCLICK"
- Xing:
href="#SPSNCLICK" xtsn="XI" xt="SPSNCLICK"
The share-to-social link doesn't work
Let's say a recipient clicks a Share-to-Social or Forward-to-Friend link in an email and receives one of the following errors:
Display Error, contact Administrator.
We were unable to process your request; please try again later.
If the problem persists, contact support for assistance.
This error occurs because they attempted click a share or forward link from an older email. Campaign always identifies the original recipient before it allows them to share to the social network or forward to a friend. (The link is associated with the original recipient for reporting purposes, among other things) and if the email is old and its deliverability data-aged out of the database (typically after 30 days), Campaign can't verify the identity of the original recipient.