"Global" Social Share Buttons

[Nikki_Aurelio]

I've seen a few different ideas and threads in the community in regards to Marketo creating global social buttons in the design studio (see idea ). Since this isn't currently possible, I was wondering if anyone has utilized creating social buttons local to one program and reused them across other programs? Obviously there'd be a lack of differentiation in reporting if the same buttons are used on various pages, but other than has anyone had any positive / negative experience with doing this?

We have a large number of resources on our website that have little traffic so are balancing the need to track any social engagement we can vs. the effort/time required for creating buttons and embedding unique ones on every single resource page. We embed the social button codes on our website landing pages (not Marketo pages).

Appreciate any experience or advice anyone has that has found away around this or implemented it! Thanks!

[SanfordWhiteman]

Snippet?

[Grégoire_Miche2]

+1 on Sanford, Snippet is the way to go. You can add an mktoSnippet to your guided template and a variable to show/display the corresponding element in the landing page.

-Greg

[Nikki_Aurelio]

So we're not using Marketo guided landing pages - we're embedding social buttons on our external website and were going to use the page meta data and tags to populate the social share fields. Even with a snippet, you're still using the same social buttons and not recreating for every asset, correct? (Sorry if I'm misunderstanding what you're proposing)

[SanfordWhiteman]

Snippets are for use in Marketo LPs only.

You could build this snippet as a Marketo Form (without any visible form fields or a standard submit button). Then it would be embeddable anywhere. And yes, it could use the page's <meta> tags to build its links on the fly.

[SanfordWhiteman]

That is, capital-S "Snippets" are for Mkto LPs. HTML/JS snippets in general can be built as I described, using the form builder.

[Nikki_Aurelio]

Ok, that makes sense. It doesn't seem like it would be different social buttons in this method either, so I think we'll just proceed with embedding the same social buttons body code we've created on multiple pages. Thanks for your feedback!

[SanfordWhiteman]

Not sure I understand whether you want different social buttons or not.

Injecting the buttons using JavaScript (as is what's actually happening when you use a form as your lowercase-S snippet) enables you to change buttons on the fly.  in contrast, a static block of HTML is, well, static HTML.

[Nikki_Aurelio]

That is what I'm trying to determine - I understand the benefit for having different social buttons for reporting and dynamic program content. However, I'm talking about 100+ pages that I'm anticipating little to none social sharing on many of the pages, so trying to determine the best way to implement globally.

Just to clarify, you're suggesting creating one global form and injecting the social button's widget loader div class within it? Then embedding that one form JavaScript on our website? Where do you place the social widget code in a form?

Thanks again! Appreciate your help on talking this through!

[SanfordWhiteman · Accepted solution]

No, I'm suggesting building your own social button widget in Rich Text area(s) on a form.  That allows you to use the Marketo Forms embed code on any site. And it also gives you a leg up in logging, since if the lead is known you can even do a background form post to show up in their logs.

But primarily the idea is to answer the question "Can you create and configure custom widgets/snippets in Marketo that can be plugged into non-Marketo pages?" The answer is yes, since forms are natively embeddable (regardless of whether they look like typical forms).