Social networking websites have revolutionized the way people interact online. Consumers are spending increasing amounts of time on these sites, want to share more and more information, opinions, valuable content. According to some reports the rise of social media may represent a threat for email marketing. Actually, they should be considered a great opportunity to enhance its effectiveness.
How to fill this gap? The first (and simplest) step to take is creating links between social media and email to provide more ways for people to share.
By following these instructions you can integrate the three most popular social networks (Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin) into your email campaigns, send them out using SendBlaster and start giving people multiple ways to interact.
FACEBOOK
Facebook can be easily integrated to your emails by adding the following “share” url:
http://www.facebook.com/share.php?u=url
Make sure to replace “url” with the web link you want to share.
e.g. http://www.facebook.com/share.php?u=http://blog.sendblaster.com
By clicking on this link, your subscribers will see a preview of your article on Facebook and will be able to choose whether to post it to their wall or send it as a direct message.
When posting to their personal profiles, your article will automatically show up in the wall of their friends, which can leave a comment or visit the link.
With a single line of html code you can gain more visibility to your content and reach a larger audience.
TWITTER
To integrate Twitter into your emails you should use this link:
http://twitter.com/home?status=yourtext- url
e.g. : http://twitter.com/home?status=SendBlaster Blog- http://blog.sendblaster.com
If your text/url is too long (over 140 characters) you should consider to pick a URL shortening service (for ex. bit.ly, cli.gs)
By clicking on this link, your readers will be directed to their Twitter page where they can publish (tweet) your story with one single click.
Instantly all of their followers will read it and, if they consider it valuable, they may re-tweet it letting you expanding your audience.
LINKEDIN
To integrate Linkedin into your emails you should use a particular (and long!) link. Let’s see how to create it.
– Type “http://www.linkedin.com/shareArticle?mini=true&url=”
– Add the link you want to share
– Type “&summary=”
– Add a custom text with %20 (creates a space) between the words (you can use this URL Decoder/Encoder tool to do it automatically)
– Type “&title”=”
– Add a title to your link
– Type “&source=”
– Type your name or company name
e.g. http://www.linkedin.com/shareArticle?mini=true&url=http://blog.sendblaster.com/&summary=SendBlaster%20Blog&title=SendBlaster Blog&source=SendBlaster&Blog
Finally, do not forget to add “Follow Us on Twitter” or “Become a Fan on Facebook” links in the sidebar or footer of every email you send out.
This will help you to get the most out of the social networking sites and, at the same time, to take maximum advantage of email marketing – at zero cost!