Higher Logic Thrive Marketing Professional (Thrive Marketing Professional) offers two features that enable mailing content to be "shared" on social-media sites:

• Social posting (see Features - Social Posting) and
• Social sharing (the focus of this article)

Posting vs. Sharing features

The following table provides a quick reference of the notable differences in these two features.

Social sharing

You can give your contacts (message recipients) the ability to share:

• a story in a mailing,
• an entire mailing, or
• a web page...

...to their own social-media accounts when you use the social sharing feature.

You configure social sharing by inserting social-media site icons into a message and selecting what to share (story, entire mailing, or web page) when the icon is clicked.

The "sharing" feature doesn't automatically post or share anything. Rather, your contacts can click the icons in the message to share the selected content to their own social-media accounts. Additionally, they can add a personal note to their post.

Set up social sharing

1. Navigate to Mailings > View.
2. Hover on the menu icon for a mailing and click Edit.

3. Click the Design tab in the message designer.
4. Click any story location to open the text-editor window.
5. Position your cursor where you want the social sharing icons to display and click the Social Networking icon in the toolbar.

6. On the Insert Social Networking overlay dialog, choose:

• • which social-media site icons to include;
  • a size for the icons (Large includes the site name; Small does not include the name);
  • what the post will link to (additional fields and notes display based on the selection);
  • whether to include a 200 x 200 pixel image (applicable to full mailing and story links; not web pages); and
  • a title for the post.

7. Click Insert.

Your social sharing icons now display in the mailing.

When you send your mailing, your contacts can click a link to share the selected content to their own social-media accounts, and they can add a note to their post.

Using story layouts

While the steps above outline the way to insert social sharing icons into individual stories, you may want to make these icons a part of your story layouts. When you create a new story layout, simply click the social sharing icon inside the story layout's HTML editor. Save the icons inside your story layout, and you'll never need to worry about adding them one-by-one.

Facebook nuances

Image names

When you upload images to Thrive Marketing Professional and you want to share these images within your Facebook post, the thumbnails must have an image name of 15 characters or fewer with zero spaces. If you have an image name longer than 15 characters (or with a space), it won't appear as a thumbnail in your Facebook post.

Character length

You must have a story description with at least 120 characters (including spaces) in your story or Facebook won't show the description.

Facebook looks for the first paragraph tag (<p>) in your code that has at least 120 characters to provide the description. If you do not have such a tag in the HTML, Facebook can't find a description to use.

When using Story Layouts, make sure that your description/preview text is within paragraph tags (<p>your_description</p>).

Story name

Always enter a name for your story. This name becomes the Facebook headline when you share the story.