Coding emails and landing pages with social links
Latest posts | Feed | By Mark Brownlow on October 14, 2008
Last week I looked at adding "share this" links to your emails. After explaining how you might choose which social bookmarking, news and network sites to link to, I was asked exactly what form these links should take.What code do you use when linking to places like Facebook or Digg in your emails or landing pages?
In my experience you have four choices.
1. Social link tools
There are various services that let you place a single "share this" link on a web page. When a user clicks on that link, it brings up an intermediate social linking page which allows them to submit the content to any one of a range of popular social sites.
Example tools include Socializer, SocialMarker, Socialize-it or SocialBookmarkIt.
The problem here is that these links are script-based in their default format and thus suited to landing pages, but not emails (at least not without a workaround).
There are also branding issues. The activated social linking page is usually hosted remotely and features third-party ads or logos.
Check, however, for premium tool versions that allow customization of that hosted page to support appropriate branding, colors, fonts etc. that better integrate with your website look and feel.
2. Social link generation tools
Another alternative is to use a tool that automatically generates HTML link code that you simply add to your email or landing page. Examples are the Social Bookmark Link Creator and the ICE tool.
To use them, you need only know:
- Which social sites you want to link to from the list supported by the tool
- The URL of the content you want shared (i.e. the page that people following a shared link should end up on)
- The title of that shared content
3. Add links manually
If you're happy adding links to emails and web pages, there's nothing stopping you inserting social links manually.
Nearly every social site contains information on the appropriate code for "share this" links, and often provide buttons and other graphics to make these links more attractive.
These links are always suitable for web pages (i.e. landing pages) but not always for inserting into emails, where you want a basic HTML link and not a script or form-based "share this" link.
Below you'll find the relevant explanatory pages for building "share this" links to some of the more popular social sites, together with an indication of whether these links are suitable for use in an email:
- Facebook...for emails, use this link format:
- Fark (includes plain links suited to emails)
- Slashdot (ditto)
- Digg (ditto)
- StumbleUpon (ditto)
- reddit: here for script-based links and buttons or here for the simple link suited to email
4. Check what your service provider can do
With all the interest in integrating Web 2.0 and email, ESPs will inevitably seek to provide supporting tools. So check whether your service is planning functionality that automatically inserts social links into your emails.
At the moment, I'm only aware of Silverpop's "share to social" tool, which inserts links to the MySpace and Facebook social networks. I'm sure other ESPs will follow.
The advantage with using an ESP tool is simplicity and (particularly) tracking features you usually don't get with manual solutions like those above.
The disadvantage is you probably want alternative or additional social links that your ESP won't necessarily offer.
This is new ground so please do add your own advice, suggestions, corrections and/or experience in the comments.
Tags: email marketing, social networks, web 2.0, social bookmarking
[This post brought to you by Campaigner Email Marketing]
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