Adding Facebook Sharing to your Email Marketing
Monday, March 9th, 2009
Two-thirds of the world’s Internet population visit social networking or blogging sites, accounting for almost 10% of all internet time, according to a new Nielsen report “Global Faces and Networked Places. From December ‘07 through December ‘08, Facebook added almost twice as many 50-64 year old visitors (+13.6 million) than it has added under 18 year old visitors (+7.3 million), according to the report. What does this mean for Email Marketing? If two-thirds of your list is on Facebook, you need to give them tools in your email campaigns to share content so you can leverage the growing audience and gain more visibility for your content – and potentially more subscribers and conversions. (This is being referred to now as SWYN (Share with your Network), which is the worst acronym possibly ever.) Let’s take a look at how you can start to integrate Facebook into your campaigns.
Share Links from Email to Facebook
For your content to be shared on Facebook, you need to use the “Share” url they have created. By using this, it will create a preview of the content, which can then be posted to a profile or sent as a direct message.
Copy and paste the following line of code into your email and replace <url> with the link you want to Share.
http://www.facebook.com/share.php?u=<url>
Here is an example of the process from the Thrillist, an über-hip daily email. Here is the social toolbar from the email, located below the content.
By clicking on the, you are directed to this page at Facebook, which creates a preview with optional image selections from the page URL provided, which in this case is the link to the post on the site, which is identical to the content from the email.
