It has become quite the thing to get social share links into emails. Often called SWYN an abbreviation of “share with your network”.
The idea is to provide as many viral options as possible for recipients to spread the word. ReTweet to tweet a link to everyone who follows you and Facebook Like are the two most popular and now have buttons you can easily put onto your pages and emails where the browser view link is shared and the opt-out link is disabled.
This means that the same content is shareable on more the one ‘page’. That got me thinking about if one is better than the other and if so why?
3 Primary Sharing Options
| Page Like | |
| Pros | Cons |
| The direct page to one story is added to the status of my social network.This is good for traffic just to that pageThis is also good for SEO (Google Juice) as Google and Bing count links from social sites – including shortened ones – very highly due to the nature of the traffic | People will not get to easily see the other great content that you have so very carefully put into an email and will only click to one page.The website will have to do the rest to get people moving around. |
| Email Like – newsletters | Normally contains a group of links & stories. |
| Pros | Cons |
| In these cases clickers will be able to get to the actual email, this will server as something like an aggregation page to get to the site.It is a well organised group of the best content from the site that month/week/quarter | But people are still not on the web-site siteEmails do not have Google juice, especially not as good as a social site.If the web-site is well organised each page should make access to other content as easy and well presented as a newsletter. |
| Email Like – single call to action offers | If the email is a single call to action offer or event… The there will be one link to a special landing page and the entire email will be about getting people to click it. |
| Pros | Cons |
| More people get to see the email and decide whether or not to click through and convert. | But people are still not on the web-site site first click.If someone find this on someones wall or twitter, surely they would expect to go straight to the page with the offer on it, not see another teaser selling it again and then click through when they are already half sold by their friend Liking it in the first place.Emails do not have Google juice, especially not as good as a social site. |
Newsletters
So there you have it, as far as newsletters are concerned the social recipient experience is only better than from the email if the web-site does not make it as easy to find other content from the site. This is unlikely seeing as everyone has a CMS nowadays.
Single Call to Action
Single call to action offers are about one click through, a tweet is a subject line and a call to action, why send them to the email with the same thing just more of it. Send them straight to the goal page.
Google Juice
One big ‘shexzy’ part of social is the SEO benefits. Google and Bing have both confirmed that click through to your site from Twitter and Facebook are counted. This is because actual people have recommended the content of the page to others who have then clicked through, so of course it should get Google Juice for it.
People clicking through to your email will not help your site’s search rankings, unless the browser view is hosted somewhere inside Google’s world, like a sub-domain of your web-domain with the Google tracker in it. You can’t add it to the email because inboxes will reject it or strip it out, so you have to rely on your ESP to supply that. You might as well get people to like your site more than your emails.
Best of Both Worlds
Or can you have both? Maybe, you get to chose what the ReTweet and Like button actually shares. You don’t have to Like or Share the email browser view. You can make it like or share the actual link destination of an article on your site.
