Social Sharing in Sitecore 9

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Social Connected module

Because of big changes in architecture introduced in Sitecore 9 with xConnect, there is still no Social Connected module available for Sitecore 9. This is just my assumption 🙂
You could install this module as separate module for Sitecore 7.
For Sitecore 8, it was already integrated.
I have contacted Sitecore and also asked on Sitecore StackExchange whether Social Connected module with be integrated into Sitecore 9 but I haven’t received any official response.
I saw Sitecore page with alternatives like Slackla and Telligent but they aren’t actually alternatives as they are serving different purposes than this module.

Custom solution

For our prototyping purposes, we have decided to go with mixed custom & SXA solution as we have already used SXA in our project.

Mixed solution contained front end (FE) which used SXA and also back end (BE) part which was custom developed.

Custom solution – Front End

On FE side we have used SXA and its AddThis component together with our AddThis account.

In AddThis Tools, we have configured two website tools:

  1. Follow Button Inline
  2. Share Button Floating

social4

We have placed pubid identification number generated in AddThis to styling options of SXA Addthis component in the footer Partial design therefore we gave visitors possibility to follow our company accounts:

 

social6

We have also added HTML code component from “Follow Button Inline” tool to enable showing this component on page / footer:

social5.PNG

 

This is how it looks like in Experience Editor in Edit mode:

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We have placed “Share Button Floating” widget on the side to gave visitors possibility to share currently visited page on various social media:social.PNG

 

For this widget, we didn’t have to do any special settings in SXA as we had AddThis code in footer already so AddThis is placing this widget automatically which was great for our purposes.

In AddThis dashboard, you can see really nice representation of data:

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Custom solution – Back End

On Back End side we have done custom solution.

We have added buttons to Content Editor to its ribbon for certain templates. Items based on these templates where then shareable on Facebook and LinkedIn. Because of the time constraints, we have made simple integration just by using share urls. We haven’t done full integration using Facebook or LinkedIn API’s.

With this mixed approach we gave ability to share pages/items to visitors of the site on their walls and activities and also for content editors to share pages/items on company Facebook/LinkedIn pages.

I described this approach and also complete process of creating custom buttons in Sitecore Ribbon in this blog post.

As a teaser, this is how it looked like at the end:

shareable03

 

Cheers!

 

One comment

  1. Pingback: Adding custom social buttons to Content Editor in Sitecore 9 – chorpo -> to the core

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