4.3: Promote to Facebook Pages and Groups

Social media promotion should be a part of any marketing strategy. Curating interesting content from your community and sharing to social media channels like Facebook and Twitter is a great way to drive traffic to your site.

Invision Community 4.2 introduced Social Media Promotions to allow this.

You hit the promote button, fill out the text to share with each service, click which photos to include and schedule the promotion or send it immediately.

We use this feature almost every single day to share highlights to our Invision Community Facebook page and Twitter.

This feature has had a significant impact in attracting visitors to our blog. This is now a core part of our marketing strategy.

So what's new in Invision Community 4.3?

Facebook Groups and Pages
A popular feature request was to allow sharing to Facebook groups that you are an administrator of, as well as Pages you own.

Not only that, but we now allow you to share to many places at once.

When setting up Facebook, you can choose which Facebook properties to be used when promoting.

When sharing content, you can choose where to share it to right on the dialog.

Here you can see that we're sharing to two of three possible places. "It's a secret" is a Facebook Group (which makes it a pretty poor secret).

The "Lindy Throgmartin Fan Club" is my favourite page on all of Facebook. What it lacks in members, it makes up for in enthusiasm.

You may also notice that the Facebook box is empty. Facebook have very strict guidelines on sharing content. They prefer that you do not auto-populate the content.

You can always access the item's original content on the promote dialog, so you can refer to it.

Setting a custom page title
When you share to social media channels, you also have the opportunity to add to the 'Our Picks' page.

We've made it possible to add a custom title for the Our Picks page so you don't have to use the content item title, although this is still the default.

Editing an Our Pick
When editing an item shared to 'Our Picks', you now have the option of editing all the data, including the title and the images attached.