One-click Social Share

We’ve made it super simple to connect MailChimp with Twitter, allowing you to automatically tweet a link to your campaign as soon as you hit the send button. Just go to your Account settings, and click on Integrations. Under Twitter, just click the big authorize connection button and oAuth will take it from there. This is a safer and better way of integrating with Twitter because it means you no longer have to enter your Twitter username and password directly into MailChimp.

It’s also a snap to share your email using Facebook, Myspace, Stumbleupon, Digg or Delicious using our social share feature. In your Campaigns list, just click on the “social share” link underneath the email you’d like to share with your network.

You’ll be taken to an intermediate screen (which will open in a new tab or a new window, depending on how you have your web browser configured) where you’ll need to enter your username and password for the service, and then voila! Easy peasy.

Twitter Template

Are you a social media power user who wants to be able to include your Twitter identity as part of your email campaign branding? If so, the Twitter template is perfect for you.

When you go to create your email campaign, you’ll want to select the “new email” tab when it’s time to select your template. Then scroll down to the bottom of the page and you’ll see the Twitter template.

On the next screen (the campaign builder), you’ll see that MailChimp visits your twitter page, and automatically pulls in your colors and background image:

When you look closely, you’ll see that we’ve included a new Twitter merge tag in the right hand column. Where it says “TWITTER:FULLPROFILE” we’ll insert your twitter avatar, follower count, and recent tweets.

Then when you click on “pop up preview,” we’ll show you how the merge tag looks when it pulls in your data:

Tracking Twitter Tweets & Re-tweets

As you probably already know, every time you finish a MailChimp campaign and send it off, you can post a link to the campaign archive on Twitter, Facebook, and other social networks. In order to make this work on Twitter, we had to create our own URL shortener (EepURL).

Ever since then, people have been asking us for some magical way to track how many people tweeted and re-tweeted their email campaigns. So we did that, and you can now access those stats through the Reports tab in your MailChimp Dashboard.

1. How many people tweeted about the campaign
2. How many people re-tweeted
3. Who the tweeters are
4. Timeline of tweetage from original tweet

Social Site Merge Tags

We’ve made it super easy to insert social sharing links into your emails with just a simple merge tag.

So instead of having to go grab icons and links individually for sites like Twitter, Digg and LinkedIn, you can just add *|MC:SHARE |* wherever you’d like your social links to appear.

If you only want to include certain social sites, there’s also a way to do that using MailChimp’s merge tags.

Here’s how…

*|SHARE:SITE_NAME1,SITE_NAME2| *

So for example, to just include Facebook, Twitter, Myspace and Digg, you would insert the code:

*|SHARE:facebook,twitter,myspace,digg| *

Resulting in the following:

Eventbrite Integration

We’re excited to announce that MailChimp has partnered with Eventbrite, and our services are seamlessly integrated. Build events in Eventbrite, then design & deliver awesome invitations in MailChimp. Ben wrote an excellent tutorial that covers all the nitty gritty details about the integration, so I won’t go into all that here.

Essentially though, you can create and sell tickets using Eventbrite. Then design a great looking invitation using MailChimp, track ticket sales and stats, and even create follow up emails using Mailchimp’s powerful segmentation tools!

We think this video shows how excited we are about this, and why you should be too! (warning: there’s smooching involved):

Video Merge Tag

If you want to include a link to a video on Vimeo, YouTube or Blip.tv, we’ve got a new merge tag to help save you time. It’ll automatically generate a screenshot of the embedded video player, which will link to the location of the video online.

Just use:

*|YOUTUBE:xxxx| *
*|VIMEO:xxxx| *
*|BLIPTV:xxxx| *

Where “xxxx” is the unique video identifier at the end of each link.

J—aiyznGQ in:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J—aiyznGQ

2753436 in:
http://blip.tv/file/2753436

6223439 in:
http://vimeo.com/6223439

The resulting email will look like this:

MailChimp Is a Social Monkey

Some additional posts you might find interesting:

• Using Twitter to Rate Email Campaign Effectiveness
• Adding a Newsletter to Your Facebook Fan Page
• Trends in Email: Sharing Via Facebook and Twitter
• Using Posterous To Drive Facebook Fan Engagement
• Using Facebook Fan Pages in Conjunction With Email
• App Sketchbook Uses Email For Feedback and Doubles Twitter Followers
• Using Twitterkeys and Special Characters For Email Marketing

With a full-blown Wordpress blog, in addition to our Facebook Fan Page and Twitter account, you might be wondering why in the world I’d want another site to maintain. The simple answer: the more I use Posterous, the more I love it! — Especially for the particular niche it serves. (more on that after the jump)

I like to think of Posterous as a miniblog– something that gives you greater freedom of expression than Twitter’s 140 characters (known as microblogging), but often is shorter and more sketchy than a fully fleshed out Wordpress post. One of my favorite Posterous features is autoposting, which allows you to link any content you send to Posterous with sites like your Facebook page or Twitter stream. The autopost feature currently supports Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Picasa, YouTube, Vimeo, Tumblr, Blogger, Wordpress and Xanga, with more integrations on the way.

For MailChimp, I’ve made the decision to only link Posterous to our Facebook Fan Page. So when I’m finding and adding content, our Facebook Fans are the audience that I generally have in mind.

So you might be wondering: but MailChimp, now that you have over 3,500 Facebook fans, how do you make sure your content is relevant to everyone?

The candid answer is that I don’t. I have to assume that if someone becomes a MailChimp fan, they’re interested in what we have to say. Much like email marketing, becoming a fan is a way of opting-in. In the case of Facebook, this means that someone is electing to receive updates from MailChimp in their home feed. (Side Note: Facebook does give you the option of hiding updates from a particular person or page if you find the number of updates annoying or excessive.)

As far as the content is concerned, often times I’ll post information and photos about what’s going on in our office (chimps are people too, you know!), links to interesting articles about design, small business and entrepreneurship, and even the occasional funny monkey photo.

Two things that have worked well for driving engagement on Facebook (measured in terms of “likes” and comments) by way of Posterous have been 1) making sure to maintain variety in the type of links and content posted, and 2) not treating the Posterous to Facebook autopost feature as “set it and forget it.” How can you expect people to engage with your business or brand– on Facebook, Twitter or your blog– if you don’t maintain an active presence there? I’ve made a habit of consistently responding to what our fans and followers have to say and have noticed a measurable correlation in their level of engagement thanks to Facebook Page Insights. So after posting something to Posterous and properly tagging it (I like to keep things categorized and organized), I head over to Facebook to see what, if anything, our fans are saying about it.

A fan page is it’s own little ecosystem, and it needs to be nurtured and treated that way. This becomes even more important if you’re feeding content into it from auxiliary sources.

Twitter and Facebook seem to be getting all the attention from email marketers now (see: Sharing with Twitter v. Facebook), but don’t forget flickr, because it can be a great way to get your subscribers to contribute to your conversation with photos!

MailChimp provides a one-click feature for subscribers to share their completed email campaigns via the primary social networks. Currently 9% of campaigns (roughly 90 million emails) are shared via Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Digg, StumbleUpon, or Delicious.

To begin, you need to make sure that you have two things: 1. a Facebook fan page, and 2. the HTML code from MailChimp that allows you to embed your sign-up form on a web page.

Step 1. Grab your MailChimp list’s embed code

In your MailChimp Dashboard, click on the Lists tab. Then click on “forms” for the list that you want the subscribes to go to.

Then you’ll select “integration code” from the top menu, which will present you with a link to the Signup Form Embed Code. From here, you’ll simply want to copy the embed code and paste it into TextEdit or NotePad.

Step 2. Add the Static FBML Application

FBML stands for Facebook Markup Language. At its core, FBML allows you to embed your application in the Facebook platform. It isn’t quite HTML, but it isn’t quite proprietary either. (Jesse Farmer provides a great introduction to FBML if you’re interested in reading more.) The easiest way to add the application is to search for “Static FBML” using the upper right hand search box on Facebook. It’ll show up as the second search result, and you need to click on “add to page”.

Step 3. Create the Newsletter Signup Tab

Navigate back over to your fan page and select “edit page” from right below your profile picture.

Scroll down to find FBML in your list of applications, and click on the little pencil icon to edit it.

In “Box Title” you can give the tab a name like “Email Signup” or “Newsletter”. Then in the “FBML” section, you’ll paste in the embed code that you copied from MailChimp in Step 1. It’s easy to style your form using basic HTML to give it a look and feel that matches your brand. One suggestion that Return on Subscriber makes (and we agree with wholeheartedly) is adding the following customization:

<form method=”post” action=”http://url.com” TARGET=”_blank”>

at the end of the url to open a new browser tab or window. This is nice thing to do for your user so they can easily find their way back to the page they were originally browsing.

Step 4. Add a New Tab to Your Fan Page Top Navigation Bar

Go back to your fan page and select “edit page” from directly below your profile picture. Then scroll down to find FBML in your list of applications, and click on the little pencil icon to edit it once again. This time you want to select “Application Settings”.

From the Application Settings, you’ll have the option to select whether you want your signup form to appear as a box (in the manner of Fans, Notes, or Favorite Pages), a top navigation tab, or both. As you can see on the MailChimp Fan Page, we have our signup form set up as both a box and a tab. This is a matter of individual preference and will not affect the functionality of the form.

And that’s it! If you have questions, thoughts or suggestions on innovative ways to use this, please leave a comment and let us know!

In case you missed it, last Saturday at 12:01 AM EST Facebook gave both individuals and fan pages the ability to register their own vanity URLs. The main reason this is awesome is that it allows you to market your Facebook page much more easily. Instead of a long string of letters and numbers, you now have the benefit of something short and tidy. Like facebook.com/mailchimp. During the recent NBA Finals, for example, I noticed brands like Vitamin Water promoting their fan page URLs instead of their main company website in their commercials. And this type of cross promotion is definitely working! Vitamin Water currently boasts over 500,000 Facebook fans.

There are some caveats to note about getting a vanity URL for your fan page right now. Unfortunately, if you have fewer than 1,000 fans you’ll have to wait until June 28, 2009 to secure your vanity URL. In an effort to mitigate copyright issues and naming rights, you will have the opportunity to report that someone is infringing on your intellectual property rights by filling out this form. This may not be entirely helpful if you’re an admin without a registered or trademarked name that you can protect though.

Have you claimed your own small piece of social media realestate yet? Be sure you do– Facebook was reporting that nearly 6,000,000 custom usernames had been claimed as of Monday 6/15. After that, be sure to stop by and connect with MailChimp on Facebook at facebook.com/mailchimp.

and then sent her fans a link to her campaign archive. If you’re an artist that’s using MailChimp and Facebook, you might want to consider combining the two.

Here’s how to find your campaign’s archive link (hint: it’s not the link at the top of the email that you sent to yourself)…

After you send your MailChimp campaign, go to your stats page:

Right above your nifty pie-chart, click the “view campaign” link:

Then click on the “Campaign Archive” link:

This will open up a window to your campaign’s online archive. When you use this link, any merge tags that you have in there (like *|FNAME|*) will be empty. Also, certain links, like the unsubscribe link, will be turned off. This is why you don’t want to use the “View this in your browser” link to post any campaigns that you’ve sent to yourself online.

Did you know that you can actually create your own “Email Archives” page on your website, and MailChimp will keep it automatically updated whenever you send new campaigns? And that it’s totally free?

You just use our campaign archive folders:

This is a relatively new feature at MailChimp that lets your subscribers share your campaign via twitter, facebook, digg, reddit, linked in, and other social sites. If you’d like to add this to your MailChimp campaigns too, just insert this little tag: *|MC:SHARE|* in your footer (or wherever you want) and we’ll do the rest.

Another cool merge tag to try: *|TRANSLATE:EMAIL_LANG|*