Use MailChimp Social Cards to increase shareability

If you’re a MailChimp user, there are likely a lot of features you haven’t utilized. Many of those features take very little time to set up, but can be those final details that your email newsletter has that most others don’t.

One such feature is MailChimp’s Social Cards, which can increase your email campaign’s shareability. Let’s take a look at what Social Cards are and three tips for really making use of them.

What Social Cards are

By default, MailChimp makes your email campaign archives available on the web. One reason they do that is so that you and others can share that version of your campaign on social media and other places with people that aren’t subscribed to your email newsletter.

However, the campaigns, when shared, would not have the greatest default thumbnail or description. MailChimp’s Social Cards were introduced in July 2014, and allows you to customize how that campaign archive looks when shared on social media, specifically on Facebook and Twitter.

Although at one point social cards were actually utilized by Gmail’s visual Promotions Tab (an optional experimental feature of Gmail), MailChimp appears to have removed that at some point.

How Social Cards work

On the final confirmation screen, you’ll see Social Cards as an item in your list. By default, Social Cards are disabled.

Just click on the Edit button, then Enable Customized Social Cards, and you can then customize the featured image, the title, and the description.

If you don’t enable it and customize the settings, the default image may be something like your email header, instead of what you’d really like it to be.

Tip 1 – Text preview

In the Design step, hopefully you already replaced the text in the very top left that says, “Use this area to offer a short preview of your email’s content.”

If so, just copy and paste that new text into the Social Cards field that says, “Write a short description about this image.”

Tip 2 – Title

Your Title should be both enticing and accurately reflect what your email was actually about. If your subject already fulfills both of those requirements, just copy and paste it into the Social Cards field that says “Title.”

Tip 3 – Thumbnail

Just like your Title, the Featured Image should be both enticing and accurately reflect what your email was about. However, it should also:

• Look good and be clear at 100 x 100 pixels
• Be at least 120 x 120 pixels
• To show as big a graphic as possible on Facebook and Twitter, be 1200 x 1200 pixels

For the thumbnail, MailChimp will actually let you upload a custom image. So if none of the images you actually used in your email fit those requirements, you can upload a custom image.

However, we recommend having a similar image in your email somewhere. Otherwise, you might confuse someone if they click on the link and don’t see that image actually on the email campaign archive.

Just a minute or two per MailChimp campaign, and your Social Cards will give your email campaign or email newsletter that extra degree of shareability!

Freddie image courtesy of Chimpstock, the Mailchimp stock photos website.