Five years ago only college students used Facebook, but today even my mother posts comments on my wall. Why not use this popular method of connecting friends and family members to connect people with your Actions? Adding a Share button to your Actions in Salsa allows people to share your Action with their contacts in Facebook. 

The Share button will allow subscribers to easily post a link to your Action on their Facebook walls. Facebook takes the URL and extracts the title, an image, and a bit of text. It looks like this (click the image to make it bigger):



(Screenshot Credit: Anne Dougherty of CleanWater.org)

Go to the Facebook widget generator to easily create your Share button. The generator looks like this:

 

Change the “Link to share” option to “Custom URL” and paste in the URL of your Action. Then copy and paste the code from the “Paste this code in the body of your site” section to your action where you would like the button to appear. Make sure you paste the code in Source mode when editing you Action.

Those are the basics. But what if you want to know what subscribers are taking action by clicking through the Facebook link? Anne Dougherty found a creative and simple way to track this information using tags.

All you have to do is add &tag=facebook to the end of your Action URL before pasting it into the generator. For example, if your action URL is:

http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/1111/p/dia/action/public/?action_KEY=2222

If you add the Facebook tag, it will become:

http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/1111/p/dia/action/public/?action_KEY=2222&tag=facebook

This will add a “facebook” tag to any supporter who takes Action after clicking on the link from within Facebook. The tag doesn’t have to be “facebook” but can be any tag you’d like. You can have different tags for separate Actions.

We’re working to find more ways to integrate Salsa with Facebook and other social media platforms. If you have any suggestions, we would love to hear them!