Create a Social Form with Formstack’s Share Buttons
Sharing is caring. Isn’t that what mom always told us?
Well, as a part of our recent (awesome) updates, we have now included a way for you to make mom proud.
Enter: Social Sharing Buttons
This new feature allows you, and those filling it out, to automatically post the form link to your Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn accounts straight from the form. It’s a great way to get more views, which means more submissions, more contacts, more volunteers and more customers. (More! more! more!)
Here’s how it works:
1. While editing your form, click on the “Settings” tab. Within the left-hand column, you’ll see “Plugins” at the bottom of the list. Click that.
2. Next, you’ll want to go to the “Utilities” section and there you will see the “Share Buttons” option. Click Add. Once you click that, you’ll see “Share Buttons” add to the list of items on the left. (It’ll turn a bright yellow once it’s added to let you know, “I’M OVER HERE!”)
3. Next, click on that “Share Buttons” tab to bring up this screen. Here you will see a field that allows you to edit the message to share. This message will be the automated content sent with the link when people click on one of the share buttons within your form. You’ll want to make this clear, concise and to the point. Be sure to click “Save Settings” when you are finished.
4. Now that you are all finished with editing your form, you are ready to publish! Once you click the “Publish” tab, click on the link to make sure everything looks A-okay. Since you have activated the share buttons on your form, you should see this at the bottom of that page now.
5. In order to share your form, just click one of the options. In this case, I selected Twitter. Once you click one of the social options, it’ll prompt you to verify your account. After that, you’ll see the pre-populated message you created along with the link to your form! (Don’t worry if the link is super long in your Twitter field, it’ll automatically shorten within their app.)
We hope you find this new feature useful to gaining more submissions! Let us know if you have any questions in the comment section below.
Related Posts
Crowdsource Your Idea with Survey Forms →
Guest Post: 5 “If This, Then That” Recipes for Social Media →
How to Maximize Your Form’s Geolocation Feature →
Q&A with Patrick Tarpey of SmartFile →
About the Author
Breena (@beefain) is the PR and marketing specialist at Formstack. She oversees media relations, social media, and content strategy. She graduated with a Bachelors of Arts in Journalism degree from Indiana University. When she's not spending her time bragging about how sweet Formstack is, she's usually drooling over fashion sites, writing, or going to shows... and probably eating.
I like the possibilities this feature opens up but haven’t tried it yet. Are you able to specify the specific Facebook page (such as a business page managed under a personal account) or will it always post to your default FB login? What about being able to specify more than one twitter feed for it to land on/in? And will the LinkedIn account be a business page managed under a personal account?
I like this feature but would prefer if you could choose the URL that gets populated. That way I could have it go to the page where the form is embedded on my main site rather than have it come to the standalone version of the form.
I would really like to use this feature but cannot because of two design problems that I hope Formstack might be able to upgrade:
(1) The link has to be customizable. Using the link for the CURRENT form means users have to stop to share BEFORE submitting the form. I want to give them the option to share AFTER submitting the form. With the current limitation, this means they would get a link to the results page.
(2) The share buttons appear on a frame at the very bottom of the browser window. They are too easy to miss way down there. (Also, there seems to be a problem in Chrome where clicking the LIKE button opens up a small window under the browser which is not visible.)
Hope the formstack team can upgrade this feature soon. Thanks for listening.