Increase your social shares - how to tweet individual articles from emails

Using the social share within email is an extremely good way to gain interest from your contacts via your social space. At Pure360 we use social share functionality all the time when sending out our newsletter and other emails.

I’m the Inhouse Graphic Designer at Pure360 and I design and create the Email Marketing Manual, our monthly newsletter to prospects and clients. We’ve recently introduced a cool new function within it which allows you to tweet an individual article rather than the whole email with just a simple piece of code.

Let’s begin with a visual of how it looks within our email newsletter:

                              

As you can see from the visual I have just used the standard “Tweet” button which was simply added in as an image. Then, for the magic to happen, you just add this special piece of code on the link.


                  

The code may look a little confusing at first but once you take a closer look, it’s pretty easy to understand. The coded highlighted in yellow is where you put the link to your content that you want to tweet. As you can see it is placed after the URL= and stops at the &amp part, dead simple.

Don’t worry about using URL shortners as Twitter will automatically do this for you. The next part is what you would like the tweet to say, this has been highlighted in Green. It is best to use the title from the article or something which is more of a call to action so that it’s clear and stands out in the viewer’s timeline. As you can see from the code all of the spaces use a % sign to break them up. If you don’t use these the message will not process properly and the call to action will finish at the first space.

With this process you can also add the via=  function which is highlighted in blue. This is where it allows you to add your @ sign to get people on your Twitter page and also promote where the content is from. To add this simply repeat the steps as before.

This is how it looks when the user hits the tweet button in the email.

               
As you can see from the example above all of the code has transformed all of the HTML into a clear and extremely informative tweet without the user having to type or copy and paste any content themselves, which in terms of getting the recipient to circulate your content and promote your company is great, and it has been implemented with ease.

              

Since we’ve been doing this within our newsletters we have noticed that our content is being circulated a lot more as our email recipients are able to choose the specific articles they’re interested in, and do not have to tweet the entire newsletter.