Share button on steroids: share from Messenger bot to newsfeed

Messenger has a Share button that “ enables people to share message bubbles with their contacts using a native share dialog in Messenger”.

This Share button has been used by a number of popular chatbots to achieve viral growth. There are two limitations of this Share button:

1. Messenger docs mention: “The Share Button can only be sent inside the Generic Template”. In other words, if you would like to enable sharing of something else like a receipt, you’d have to create workarounds.
2. The user can only send it to other users in Messenger. This is a painful process for sharing to multiple users. They have to search for each person they want to share with and then tap Send. That’s way too much friction.

What if you, as a developer, could enable your bot’s users to share any content on their timeline or group without writing a line of code? Interested? Read on.

Example of the Share button on steroids

Let me first give you an example of what we accomplished with this button at Waylo.

Boom! Enable users to share to timeline or groups with two taps

How to create the share button?

The process is actually remarkably simple. The insight here is that Facebook allows you to share any link on your timeline. So, you could add a button titled “Share” on your bot and redirect it to post a link to Facebook.

But how do you add an image, title and copy to the share post? If you want to do it programmatically, here’s the template of the URL you have to share:

https://www.facebook.com/dialog/feed?app_id=<APP_ID>&link=<ENCODED-URL-TO SHARE>&picture=<IMAGE_URL>&name=<TITLE>&caption=<CAPTION>&description=<DESCRIPTION>&redirect_uri=<REDIRECT URI>

For example, for the Waylo share button in the above image, we used the following link:

https://www.facebook.com/dialog/feed?app_id=184683071273&link=https%3A%2F%2Fm.me%2FtheWaylo%3Fref%3D'+refID+'&picture=https%3A%2F%2Fdl.dropboxusercontent.com%2Fs%2F3n3yafer9oqe4n9%2Fhotel4.jpg&name=Book%20a%20hotel%20with%20one%20text%20and%203%20taps&caption=%20&description=%2415%20off%20your%20first%20hotel%20stay&redirect_uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.facebook.com%2F

Bonus: Notice the dl.dropboxusercontent.com in the above link? It is a cool hack to host images for free :)

How do you generate the share link without coding? Very simple. Head over to https://donordigital.com/services/socialshare/, add your text and generate the link. Boom!

Summary

Let me summarize the steps:
a. Add a button titled “Share” to your chatbot .
b. Head over to https://donordigital.com/services/socialshare/, generate a share URL and add that as the redirect URL for the button.

See the share button in action at Waylo’s Hotel Booking bot and let me know if you have any questions. Would love to know of a way to programmatically pre-populate a comment to the FB post being shared.

Happy virality :)