VWSocial share?
Hey Everyone - This is going to be a very dumb question, but my ESP does not offer social share and I want to include it in my email besides just a link to my company social media pages. But, do you know where I would go to get the URL or code for Facebook and Pinterest? (Because it looks like after reading on here I can use ClickToTweet for Twitter) It sounds like I would not use the developer tools so a third party tool would be my only hope.
Also, random question - would the below be correct for printing the email?
<a href="#" onClick="window.print();return false"><img src="http://simpleview.dmplocal.com/dsc/collateral/microsite_print.png" width="70" height="34" border="0" title="Print Icon" alt="Print Icon" /></a>
Thanks so much, I really appreciate the info!
VW
Personally I think there are two questions that need to be answered here. The first one is actually quite easy: how to create social share links? I use Adthis. They have an option to create these with pretty much any social media you care to choose. It then gives you straight forward links with icons (downloaded from AddThis - easy to change to you own) which can then be added to you email. During the setup you add the URL you want to share and your AddThis ID.
The second question, is what do you share? Obviously on a say a blog post you add the share buttons and it will share the post how you want. With an email, what exactly do you want to share? So in my case I created a page on our website that shows an example of the newsletter email content and then a string call-to-action to signup. It works really well, it gives us a clear path (tracking wise) from email send -> social share -> to newsletter example -> signup.
Hi Veronica,
This article might be helpful for you: http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/29544/the-ultimate-cheat-sheet-for-creating-social-media-buttons.aspx#sm.000019bzwbxk7ze5ppd5yqyhw98e7
Try this: http://www.ryansolutions.com/linkbuilder/.
To answer your second question, one of the first rules of email marketing is that you can't really use JS. (I've seen people try, but I honestly don't know what client supports it). It poses a security risk and is typically disabled.
Also, Julie's solution looks correct.
In the past I've used the service from https://www.po.st - it's a free service which lets you build social sharing links through its platform, and a nice bonus is that it'll give you some stats and insight into how your links are performing.
First, you have to truly analyze why. Email and Social are very dramatically different channels. An extremely small segment of any brand’s audience will engage with them on multiple channels. Ensure you are not encouraging abandoning the email channel to engage on a social one. Ultimately, email is worth more.
If you have a compelling use case, user strategy, business strategy, cross-channel strategy, and a means to measure cross-channel attribution and social lift, the technical means are actually quite simple. Someone already suggested AddThis. While this is super easy to implement, you are then limited to manually reconciling metrics from AddThis to those of your ESP and those within each social channel. A simpler method is to use the direct endpoints (web intent) provided by some like:
Facebook
Twitter.
The most comprehensive way is to create applications on each channel that create a post and target the application from your email.
Regarding printing:
The example cannot work. No email client will accept javascript methods. Some strip the entire elements that contain any.
The user is in complete control of invoking the print function. However, you can control (influence – because the user still has control) what the document looks like when printed from most email clients by simply including CSS within a print media query.