Social Sharing Widget

The Social Sharing Widget enables your users to post activities from your site to social sites (Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo! and others), or directly to friends using email. Users can even post to many social networks at once. Providers that support sharing are listed in the Provider Sharing Support page.

You can use the Social Sharing Widget in conjunction with the Social Sign-in Widget, or you can implement it separately. When launched, the widget GUI appears as a modal interface overlaying the website (see Figure 1).

The following topics cover the Social Sharing Widget:

• Social Sharing Quick Start Guide — A short, proof-of-concept walk-through.
• User’s Guide — A step-by-step walk-through of the Social Sharing Widget’s implementation process.
• Sharing Widget JS API — Provides an in-depth discussion of the client-side APIs used to manipulate the widget.

Figure 1: Social Sharing Widget.

Users can share content through these methods:

• Share — The user can share an activity with everyone on their selected social networks.
• Direct Share — If supported, the user can select specific contacts to share with on social networks. A user may also share directly through email (See Figure 2).
• Both — The user can mix and match approaches between different social networks.

Figure 2: Sharing with Email Contacts

How it works:

• Activity — An end user performs an action on your site, like a comment, rating, review, or purchase, and then your site invokes the Social Sharing Widget.
• Connect — An end user selects one social network, and can add additional notes, and links, then clicks Publish. Janrain Engage sends the activity to the selected network and contacts. The end user can only publish to one provider network at a time.