Salsa Weekly Highlight: Sharing tool launched for social media

Posted by Leslie Hall  

11:24 AM Nov 18, 2010

Greetings!

It's the "Salsa Weekly Highlight," your quick hit on what's new in Salsa to help get the most out of your online program. As always, you can find plenty more news, updates, and conversation throughout the week on SalsaCommons.org.

We're very excited to announce the launch of Salsa's new sharing tools to extend your impact on social networks like Facebook and Twitter.

To get this upgrade, you'll want to add the package called salsa.social.common in your Salsa "Account" section. Only Super Admin users can add packages.

Once installed, the new sharing options appear under a "configure sharing" link in the floating yellow box in the upper right-hand corner of every Salsa page, action or event you edit. You'll find everything you need to use it in the documentation.

Donate Your Status

One effective way to strategically leverage Facebook sharing in Salsa pages is by running a "Donate your Status" campaign with your supporters - as seen here.

"Donating" a Facebook status allows supporters to display a link to your cause in their profile. Because it's their status and not just a news feed link, it also remains visibly stationed at the very top of their Facebook profiles.

To configure this sort of campaign:

1. Select the Salsa page you want users to share
2. Click "configure sharing"
3. Type the message you want a supporter's followers to see in "Message"
   Example: "Join me in supporting [ link ]"
4. Customize URL (recommended settings will share shortened versions of your links)
5. Enter any relevant bit.ly information, if you have an account (you don't need your own account, though)
6. Hit "save" and your page is ready to be shared as a "Donate Your Status" campaign.

Social media sharing is a constantly developing and changing medium so we're really excited about these new tools and what's to come.

As always, I'd love to hear about your experiences with this (or any) Salsa tool -- drop me a line at feedback@salsalabs.com with any comments.

Add a comment

Barbara — 02:01 AM Dec 14, 2010

I just installed it on our first action. It seems to work relatively seamlessly!<br />
<br />
2 comments:<br />
1. I know Facebook is awful for sharing the photo from the page, so maybe think about building in a photo to the share widget? <br />
<br />
2. For action pages, it would make more sense to me to have the share icon pop up on the Thank you page, not the action, but probably you can't make those shares link back to the action, not the thank you page..<br />
<br />
All in all, I look forward to testing it!