How to Optimize Shopify Social Sharing January 18, 2015 20:00
Sharing products via social media is a great way to build a following and to interact with your customers. If you do it well, it can be a fairly low cost customer acquisition channel, and it also builds brand loyalty by allowing customers to interact with your shop and employees (people love knowing they’re talking to other people).
While you can add sharing buttons to your Shopify product pages pretty easily with the free AddThis app, this doesn’t mean that your products are shares are optimized. They can look better!
Many themes already include the information social networks needs to show your products off. Rather than using a regular tweet, pin, or share to showcase your inventory, you can use Twitter cards, Rich Pins, or optimize social sharing for other networks within your Shopify store. Doing so only requires a few steps, and it’s well worth the effort.
Twitter Product Cards
Twitter Product Cards allow you to show information about your product with a detailed summary on Twitter. Regular tweets will only show a link to your product if a customer (or you) shares it via Twitter:
No card
If you enable Product Cards on your site, the tweet structure changes (you do need a Twitter account to do so). Rather than a boring, regular tweet, you’ll now have a Product Card displayed anytime someone shares a product from your site. This adds information on vendors, pricing, a product image, and brief description so that customers can see information about your product at a glance.
Twitter Product Card
Most themes already include the information needed to set up Twitter cards for your site, so you should only need to validate your site using the URL of a product page. This will automatically use Product Cards when products are shared.
If this doesn’t work, Shopify has directions on how to add product cards if your theme doesn’t include the required information (this tutorial also tells you how you can check if your theme includes the information). If you don’t want to manually add Twitter cards to your site and verify your site with Twitter, you can use an app for a one-time $9.95 fee to add Twitter cards for you.
Pinterest Rich Pins
Pinterest can be a huge driver for eCommerce stores, as it typically promotes higher average order values when compared to other platforms. We wrote about why Pinterest is important for Shopify stores, and included how to make pins better — including the use of Rich Pins.
A regular pin will show an image of your product (or blog post, or whatever is being shared) and link to the appropriate page on your site that the image was pinned from.
Regular pin
Rich pins, however, will add product information as well, similar to the Twitter Product Card. Fortunately, Rich Pins are very easy to add to your Shopify site, as Shopify recently started supporting them for all stores (though I believe you need to have a custom domain rather than a myshopify domain to use them).
You can follow Shopify’s step-by-step guide to enable product pins (a type of rich pin) because Shopify already includes the information Pinterest needs about your shop and products. You’ll verify your site with Pinterest and Product Pins will begin to show up.
If for some reason you can’t verify your site, you can also do so manually. When you try to verify it, Pinterest will show you a meta tag that can be added to your site.
Verify manually
You’ll go to your themes, click “Customize Theme” in the top right, then click “Edit HTML / CSS”. We’ll go to the main theme.liquid file and add this tag from Pinterest. I’ve added it right below my Facebook and Twitter snippets, but you can add it anywhere after the <head> and before the </head> tags (I’d recommend right before the last </head> tag if you’re not sure).
Insert tag into theme
Once you’ve verified your site with Pinterest, it may take a day or so to update your Pins. Once updated, they’ll now display product information, such as pricing and inventory status, along with each photo.
Rich Pin: Product
My favorite part about product pins is that they’ll update pricing and notify anyone that’s pinned the product if the price drops by more than 10% to do some selling for you!
Facebook Sharing
Almost every theme includes the needed code to tell Facebook how to share your site information and products, so you shouldn’t have to do anything to optimize your Facebook shares. Shopify does have instructions to help you add or fix Facebook images if your theme doesn’t give Facebook the right image to display when content from your site is shared.
This will ensure that your content contains optimal images when shared on Facebook to drive customers to your site.
Regardless of your preferred social media network, you should be doing everything you can to make sure your products look their best. Optimizing Shopify social sharing is a great way to ensure that your products are always showcased when shared via social media, and networks like Pinterest will even help you sell by tracking price for you, all for a minimal time investment.
Cover photo credit: mkhmarketing (CC BY-2.0)
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