by Thomas C. Snide, President
TCS Software, Inc.

If you’re using WebSuite2™ to host your organization’s website, I want to let you know about a great new feature we’ve added to the system.

Now, when visitors to your website view the details of any News story, Calendar item, Job posting or Classified ad, they will see four icons in the top right corner (see below).

The first three icons allow visitors to share the content on FaceBook™, LinkedIn™ and Twitter™.  The fourth icon allows them to post to multiple social media sites simultaneously - as well as send a more direct and personal email with their own comments that links back to the story.

Placing these more obvious icons at the top of the page encourages visitors to share your content.  Sharing requires little effort, since the headline, brief description and image are automatically inserted into the social media post. No retyping or cutting and pasting is required.

Hyperlinks are automatically shortened, which makes Twitter posts (‘Tweets’) with longer descriptions possible.

This functionality is made possible by ShareThis.com.  And if you like, you can obtain a ‘Publisher ID’ from them (at no charge) that we can plug into WebSuite2’s settings.  Once your Publisher ID is set-up, you can log into ShareThis.com and view detailed stats that show how much your content is being shared with others via social media channels.

From time to time, you may have content that you do not want to encourage your members to share.  WebSuite2 automatically adds these icons to the page, but you can easily remove them by adding the text ‘TCSNOSHA RE’ anywhere within the details of the article.  (Enter it with no spaces. I had to add one here in order to have it appear on this page.)  This prevents the icons from being displayed on the page.

Don’t be concerned about members sharing content that is marked as Members Only.  Even those who have a hyperlink to the content will still be required to enter a login and password to access it.

There's nothing you need to do to have this functionality on your website.  We've set it up automatically. If, for some reason, you do not see the new icons when viewing item details, please contact us.

If you have any questions or would like to talk about using social media to promote your organization, please don’t hesitate to give us a call anytime.