This article provides a lot of information to help you understand how sharing on Ambassify works. If you want a quick reminder about which campaign to create though, just answer the following question.
What do you want to share?
An existing Facebook post or video: create a Share Facebook Post campaign
One of your posts on X: create a Reshare campaign
A link to your content: create a Social Share campaign
An image: create a Share an image campaign
A video: create a Share a video or Interact with our file campaign
Want to know how they work and what the differences are? Read on. There are four different sharing mechanisms in Ambassify:
Native share: re-sharing existing social media posts
Popup share: sharing a link, image, or video using the social networks' share popups
API share: using the APIs of social media networks to share
Manual share: ask your users to download some content and share it manually
Native share: re-sharing existing social media posts
Native share is what we use to describe using the share features from one of the social media networks to share an existing post on the network, such as reposting a post on X. When you create one of these campaigns, we will usually (it isn't always possible) embed your post from the social network inside Ambassify for your advocates to see. They'll be asked to share that post and confirm they shared.
A Facebook post from Ambassify as shown in your advocates' friends' feeds.
Advantages
The social networks display your original post inside the feeds of your advocates' friends and followers. These are usually much nicer than when a regular link is shared (see later.)
The re-shared post links back to the original post, making it easier for your advocates' friends to end up on your (Facebook/X/...) page and see more of your content
On some networks like X, if someone likes your advocate's shared post, those likes are attributed to your original post, making it more popular and more likely to reach more people
Advocates can see the post inside Ambassify as well
Disadvantages
You need one campaign per social network. A regular Ambassify Social Share would let advocates share one link across multiple networks while this campaign type is restricted to sharing a Facebook post on Facebook or a post on X, etc.
Reporting inside Ambassify for this campaign is pretty limited. We cannot track what happens on social networks, so all we can do is show you how many advocates have clicked the "I shared it" button in your campaign.
Campaigns
Share Facebook Post
Reshare
Popup share: sharing a link or image using the social networks' share popups
Popup sharing is the classic way of sharing on social media. You create a campaign, enter the link to your content in Ambassify or upload an image or video, specify on which networks you want your content to be shared, and you're good to go.
Popup share inside Ambassify
In Ambassify, your advocates will see a small preview of what they're going to share, and when they click on one of the share buttons, a popup from the social media network will appear asking them to share the post.
A LinkedIn share popup
This also works for images but looks less nice than when using "API share" (see later.)
When you upload a video, we provide a tool to grab a thumbnail from the video and add a cool play button on top of it so it really looks like a video on social media.
A video shared with popup share
Set a default share message for Facebook and Xing (even without API share):
Facebook and Xing don’t allow us to prefill their share popups, so we added an extra step allowing your users to copy the message to their clipboard and paste it later. This is optional and won’t be shown if you don’t configure a default share message.
A pop-up to share on Facebook with a default share message
Advantages
One campaign can be used to share the same link on multiple social media networks
We can track the traffic that was generated by these shares per advocate, so you can see in our reporting how many times the shared link, image, or video from advocate X was actually clicked on
Very easy to use for your advocates, they just need to click on share twice (once in Ambassify and once in the popup.)
Disadvantages
We can't detect if an advocate actually shared your link, only that they clicked on the button to open the popup. Once the popup from the social network opens, we won't know what happens.
Campaigns
Social Share
Share an image
Reporting on shares and generated traffic (clicks) by advocates
API share: using the APIs of social media networks to share
API share is an account-wide feature that, when activated, upgrades all your campaigns that were using popup share to API share. Setting up a campaign for API share works exactly the same as setting up a regular popup share campaign.
For your advocates, however, there are a few changes. When they want to share your content, they will be asked to connect their social media account to Ambassify and permit us to post content on their profile. Once they've done this (only the first time), they won't have to leave Ambassify to share your content anymore; with just a click of the button, your content will be posted on their profiles.
Connecting social media accounts for sharing
Unfortunately, because we're dependent on the APIs of the social media networks, the API share has some limitations. One of these limitations is that not all social media networks are supported. For those networks, Ambassify will automatically use popup share instead.
Supported networks
LinkedIn: on users' profiles and company pages
Facebook: only on Facebook Pages; due to the privacy scandals of 2018 Facebook has decided not to allow sharing to user profiles through their API anymore
X
Another limitation to API share is that you need to be a logged-in user on Ambassify to be able to use it. This is because we need to connect the social media profile to an Ambassify user to make it work. Generally, this means we'll only activate API share for your community members. (It's technically possible to activate API share for your non-community contacts as well, but this is something we'll discuss with our customers on a case-by-case basis, so please get in touch with us if you are interested in this.)
Advantages
Unlike with the popup share, we can verify your content was shared on their feed
Shared images look a lot nicer when shared through API share than with dialog share because we'll actually upload your image to the advocate's feed
You can provide a default message to include with the shared content
For some networks, we will be able to determine how many friends or followers your advocate has so we can report more accurately on the reach generated by Ambassify
Automatic fallback to popup share when API share is not possible
Provide a default message to accompany the shared content
Disadvantages
It takes a bit more effort and trust from your advocates to set up the first time (giving their permission for us to post on their feeds). This is why we generally enable it for community members only.
It doesn't work for every social media network
The user needs an Ambassify account
Because of the fallback to dialog share, the results of your campaigns may be a bit confusing at times (see examples below.)
Consequences of the fallback to dialog share
For one campaign, a share could be either dialog or API share based on:
Network: some networks support API share, and some don't
User: a non-community contact will be using dialog share while a community member uses API share
This results in the following:
Some shares will be verified (API) while others are not (popup)
For some users (API) we will know the real reach, while for others (popup) we will have to use industry averages to determine reach
When an existing non-community contact has participated in a few (popup) share challenges and is later invited to your community, they'll start using API share. This means that we'll be able to determine their actual reach instead of an industry average, and you might see an unexpected increase or drop of reach in your reporting.
Campaigns
Social Share
Share an image
Share a video
Manual share: ask your users to download some content and share it manually
This challenge was created to handle some limitations of the API share. The API share does not support video, nor does it work for every social media network. So for customers that really want their advocates to share media files (image, video, ...) to their feed and have it displayed as if actually uploaded by the advocate instead of a link that opens in a new tab, we created this challenge.
It's pretty simple. You upload a media file (a video for example) to Ambassify, the campaign provides a button for your advocates to download the video and asks them to share it on their Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, ... You decide on the copy so you can ask them to do anything you like with the file.
Once they downloaded the file, Ambassify will ask them to confirm they did what you asked by clicking another button.
Download and share a video
Advantages
Works for any social media network
Supports any media type that the social media network allows users to upload
Disadvantages
No tracking. We only know the advocate clicked the confirm button
Requires considerable effort from your advocates. They need to download the file and manually go to Facebook/X/... to upload it
Campaigns
Interact with our file