Social Sharing in Emails

[Anonymous]

Is there a way to put the social sharing icons in an email? I know we can do this in an email, but not positive if its possible in an email. If so, can someone share a help article on how to configure this?

Thanks!

[Michael_Sogunro]

Alok - We deliver a regularly scheduled email product and would like to include in the email an option for subscribers to share the email. I'm trying to use the links below, but when I send a an email (not a sample send) the links do not work. Any thoughts or ideas on what I am doing wrong?

LinkedIn

http://www.linkedin.com/shareArticle?url­={{system.viewAsWebpageLink}}

I also tried

http://www.linkedin.com/shareArticle?url­={{system.forwardToFriendLink}}

Facebook

https://www.facebook.com/sharer/sharer.p­hp?u={{system.viewAsWebpageLink}}

I also tried

https://www.facebook.com/sharer/sharer.p­hp?u={{system.forwardToFriendLink}}

Google Plus

https://plus.google.com/share?url={{system.viewAsWebpageLink}}

I also tried

https://plus.google.com/share?url={{system.forwardToFriendLink}}

Twitter

http://twitter.com/share?url={{system.viewAsWebpageLink}}

I also tried

http://twitter.com/share?url={{system.forwardToFriendLink}}

[SanfordWhiteman]

Michael, I had to downvote your post* because leads should never, ever be sharing their View As Web Page link.  However, I do have a solution to this rather age-old problem, as I alluded to earlier.  I'll be putting the first blog post about it out tomorrow, hopefully.

* I recommend you delete the post.

[Michael_Sogunro]

Sanford, the ESP that we used prior to Marketo has the functionality to allow subscribers to share the entire email. When the subscriber selects the social media platform they want to share it on, the system removes the personalized urls - unsubscribe and update your profile links.

With the previous system we were able to report on social shares and we saw that our subscribers shared the email a lot. We also saw that we received a good number of new subscriptions from the emails that were shared.

It maybe a bad idea to allow emails to be shared when using Marketo, but not for all systems and newsletters.

Are you able to share the demo or link to MightyShare so that everyone currently on this thread and future visitors can benefit?

[SanfordWhiteman]

I definitely agree there are many situations in which newsletter-type, lead-neutral emails are a direct fit for social sharing! That's why I dug right into this project, and I'm pretty psyched with what I came up with in just a couple of days of coding.

ShareMaker allows you to tag (using HTML markup within the Marketo email editor) sections of the email you want to exclude from the share-safe version.  You also signal links you you want to use in the share-safe version (and where you want them to lead, which can potentially be different from the links in the email delivered),   And you can even inject your own Marketo form into the HTML view so that the email is re-gated.

The service is so new that I don't even have an LP up A signup page is at http://sharemaker.launchrock.com, or get in touch at sandy@figureone.com and I'll set you up with a demo.

[Michael_Sogunro]

Sanford, I just signed up for a demo. I look forward to testing your solution.

[SanfordWhiteman]

Cool.  I sent you an email -- just send me a Marketo email and/or tell me your LP domain and I'll kick you back a link to try.

[Anonymous]

Sanford, let me be the first to say you are awesome! 

[Alok_Ramsisaria]

Hello Michael,

The links which you've mentioned are actually Marketo system tokens:

{{system.viewAsWebpageLink}}

This is used if you want to view the whole email in the browser (instead of your email client) in a separate tab. If you have made any link as 'View in Browser', the whole email will be displayed to you as a separate webpage in the following tab.

{{system.forwardToFriendLink}}

This one is used if you want to forward an email to your friend or to anybody. Any link that is 'Forward to Friend' will open the email in the next tab where a pop up appears in which you can fill in details of the recipient (Name, Email ID) whom you want to forward to.

Here is an excellent video tutorial which can help you setting up Social sharing step by step Marketo Training How to Add Social Share Links to Email - YouTube​

[Anonymous]

I am actually having some trouble with the LinkedIn and Facebook versions of the URLs that Alex (video) suggests using. Twitter is fine, but on the other two networks, the URL is not populating (Facebook even tells me the URL is invalid) and, as a result, does not include a preview image.

As per the instructions in the video, here are each of the links I am using - any light anyone can shed would be much appreciated as I cannot figure this out!

• LinkedIn - http://www.linkedin.com/shareArticle?url=http%3a%2f%2fvisier.com/lp/forrester-tei-case-study-yahoo&t...
  
• Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/sharer/sharer.php?u=http%3a%2f%2fwww.visier.com/lp/forrester-tei-case-study...
  

NB: These links direct to our public facing website.

Hopefully someone can help me out!

Michelle

[Anonymous]

Hi Michelle,

The Linkedin url you specified worked for me fine.

The facebook one did not. But based on what was displayed on the page that loaded, it seems that your page url in that link might be wrong.

For example,

This link https://www.facebook.com/sharer/sharer.php?u=http://brightaspects.com/tags/integrations/

works but

https://www.facebook.com/sharer/sharer.php?u=http://brightaspects.com/tags/integrationsBROKEN/

https://www.linkedin.com/shareArticle?url=http://brightaspects.com/responsive-landing-pages-in-marke...would not as there is no page with that url on BrightAspects.com

For,

Facebook -

https://www.facebook.com/sharer/sharer.php?u=http%3a%2f%2fwww.visier.com/lp/forrester-tei-case-study...

Can you check if the url

http://www.visier.com/lp/forrester-tei-case-study-yahoo/Yahoo/Uses-Visier-Workforce-Analytics/

is correct? It gives 404 page not found error.

Rajesh

[Anonymous]

Hey Rajesh,

Those URLs are custom ones as per the video training that was included in an earlier post. Unfortunately, the Facebook one doesn't work properly in the format that the instructor suggests (this might be just a recent change that has done that) - the URL that you see a 404 error on is not my URL but the one that is created through that manual process.

However, use the link generator that another user submitted, http://sharelinkcreator.com/​ which created the link perfectly - apparently the extra information that the training video suggests you include for the Facebook link doesn't function properly.

When you use that generator, the above Facebook link now looks like this - http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.visier.com%2Flp%2Fforrester-tei-case-study-yah... .

I definitely recommend folks using the Email Share Link Creator - takes away the manual part of the process, reducing the likelihood of errors and issues such as I have experienced. At least until Marketo adds this as a standard feature

Michelle

[Anonymous]

Thanks for sharing the video tutorial Alok.

While helpful, I am again surprised that something SO simple (and used by other inbound/engagement platforms) is missing in Marketo. Another item that has to be manually added/updated leaves a lot of room for error (much like UTM codes) - we are looking to use social sharing in a fair number of our email marketing messages and this is going to require a lot of work to get the links in and active.

Thanks for the instructions and it's nice to know I am not the only one who would love to see this as an added feature in Marketo soon!

[Anonymous]

Is this similiar to the social sharing in a landing page?

[Josh_Hill13]

Sure, your designer can choose the icons and you can construct them to share with your name or pre-filled links to the content.

There are a couple of threads on this, but not sure where right now.