Shareable Content

Setting Shareable to ON turns on the share icon on the content card in the member’s mobile app or web experience, and opens up the Share Message dialogue for the Program Studio user.

Setting Shareable to ON allows the content to be shared publicly outside of your program to the location of the user's choice. Shareable content is no longer limited to a read-only status in the web experience and mobile apps.  

From the mobile apps, members can share to (or via) any mobile application that has compatible native sharing. For more information, refer to What App Can I Share to From the Mobile App?

The web experience leverages either an API or native sharing connection, depending on your configuration. This means that users can either share to just Twitter and LinkedIn (API) or Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook (native). With both API and native sharing users can still connect their social accounts for native engagement data purposes.

Content can be set as Shareable while creating the card or while editing a card, just slide the indicator for Shareable from OFF to ON.

Please note, the Shareable setting does not prevent users from downloading content or taking screenshots. The Shareable setting only controls the share icon presented to users within the program.

Share Message

After setting a post to shareable, you can craft a suggested share message for users. This share message can be edited by users and will be suggested to users depending on which network they share to and which configuration your program (native or API for web). 

We recommend using less than 280 characters. Your share message can be longer than 280 characters, but may be cut off by the social network. Note that the character count includes the share message, link (23 characters), and appended hashtag (if applicable), as well as spaces between each letter.

Note: The prepopulated share message and appended hashtag may only appear when sharing to Twitter. Facebook policy prohibits the use of prepopulated share messages, and LinkedIn appears to be implementing a similar policy (the exact behavior with LinkedIn depends on the user's device and LinkedIn mobile app version).

Appended Hashtag

The share message will always automatically include the program’s appended hashtag(s).

API vs Native Sharing

There are two basic options for a piece of software to share a piece of content on another software program - API or native sharing. APIs are like libraries that developers can refer to and build their own tools, while native sharing is maintained by the developers of the program that is shared to.

When evaluating whether to use an API or native sharing to interface with a social network, APIs seem appealing due to the high level of customization. By using an API, you would assume that SocialChorus would gain a greater amount of control over what images or text are shared from SocialChorus to a social network. However, we have found that most of the major social networks either include the functionality in both the API and the native sharing, or they don't have the functionality at all.

Additionally, we have seen a major advantage in native sharing with regards to ease of use - engagements are much higher for users sharing via native sharing rather than API. We believe that one of the reasons for this difference in behavior is that the API interrupts the share process to prompt a sign in, whereas the native sharing has a good chance of already being signed in and ready to share.

In addition, relying on APIs means that SocialChorus must build every integration one by one, and keep existing ones up to date. This limits users in terms of the programs that they can share to. For example, due to major changes in Facebook's API in 2018, web-based API sharing can only be done through LinkedIn and Twitter. With absolutely no wait for integration, native sharing right now enables mobile app users to share via the following:

• traditional social networks like Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook
• international social networks like Weibo
• internal networks like Slack, Chatter, and Yammer
• messaging apps like Message, Email, and Gmail
• productivity apps like Evernote and Pocket
• any other program with compatible native sharing

The above list of apps grows and updates on its own, with no dependency on SocialChorus integrating the programs or updating the app.

And web-based native sharing opens up sharing to Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Adding further connections will be easier and faster than the API-based sharing.