Social share emails

Social sharing directly from email has become much more popular, and easier to do in the last year or so, with Pure360 blogs from both myself and James Brooker already covering the sharing individual email components to Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest.

These blogs are sure to be invaluable to many B2C email marketers, but what about B2B?

It’s probably unlikely that content from emails about subjects such as corporate banking, plumbing supplies, cargo shipments etc.. are going to be ‘Pinned’ to Pinterest, or shared to Facebook as they are both predominantly personal social networks. Twitter is a possibility as many professionals often have both a personal and professional Twitter profile, but the main social network that B2B social sharing would really work, from both the marketer and recipients perspective would be LinkedIn.

Why LinkedIn?

Statistics accurate of January 2013 show that LinkedIn has over 200 million members globally, with this number increasing by 2 new members every second, equivalent to 10-15 million members every 3 months.

LinkedIn users are predominantly male, aged between 25-64, with an average income of $86k, and mostly without children, which would indicate that the majority of LinkedIn users are career focused business professionals.

Currently, over 2.8 million businesses globally have a LinkedIn Company Page. This pales in comparison compared to Facebook which has over 42 million pages but remember this would not just be businesses and would include musicians, actor fan pages, lolcats and more…

If you are in an industry that is B2B, then the statistics show precisely why you should allow for social sharing to LinkedIn over any other social networks.

How does it work?

First you need to create or source a LinkedIn share button image to insert into your email so that it is obvious for recipients as to what the button will do. Once you have done that, simply apply this link around your image.

Your Share Button Image Here

Upon applying this link to your image you first need to change http://www.your-url-goes-here.com to the destination URL (most likely a page on your own website).

You can then include a pre-filled ‘Article Title’ by typing some text into the “Article Title Goes Here” section, this means that the recipient doesn’t have to do it and it more likely to just click ‘Share’ to post the article.

Finally you can include a pre-filled article summary by replacing the “Article Summary Goes Here” section with your own text. Again, this can be done so that the recipient doesn’t have to, and also means that you can write an engaging article title and summary which may draw more clicks than user-created title and summary.

Upon clicking the button, a new browser window will open allowing the recipient to amend the pre-filled details if they require, and select an image that is pulled in from the destination URL.