So you want to start using Share to Social but your in-house solution or ESP doesn’t support it natively? Here is a quick example on how to add the ability to share urls to twitter.
Say I want to share the article “Importance of following the process” written last Wednesday on EmailKarma.net. I would use to following format when building the function of “Retweet” this URL in a newsletter:
The breakdown:
- The service to be shared with | Twitter: http://twitter.com/home/?status=
- The account to include as a Retweet | RT+@emailkarma (This also allows for some additional tracking of “who is sharing the message” and additional exposure to your account)
- The Message your want shared usually with a URL to the story or email newsletter | “+Importance+of+following+the+process+
http://www.emailkarma.net/2010/01/importance-of-following-process.html”
NOTE: all spaces need to be converted to a + sign in what your retweeting.
Resulting in code that looks like this: http://twitter.com/home/?status=RT+@emailkarma+Importance+of+following+the+process+
http://www.emailkarma.net/2010/01/importance-of-following-process.html
This allows for someone to click the link and have the message and link you choose as their twitter update.
And to add an image would be as follows (sqr brackets used to expose HTML):
[a href=”http://twitter.com/home/?status=RT+@emailkarma+Importance+of+following+the+process+
http://www.emailkarma.net/2010/01/importance-of-following-process.html”][img src=”http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_Gc5my9wZI80/S18dWp-dT9I/AAAAAAAAAS8/reJG8R3AJAk/s400/Twitter.jpg” /][/a]
Which would result in an image like this:
Go ahead try clicking the Image – I know you want to 😉 The Result… Once clicked you should see a screen that looks like this and is ready for you to “Update”:
For tracking purposes you could also look to use your internal tracking services (ESP link tracking), or another URL shortening services like idek.net or bit.ly.
