The ask: include in an email the ability to share a video to social media (Facebook, Instagram, etc) by clicking on an icon.

Something like: “Copy and paste the following link to share this video on social: [LINK HERE]” along with adding the video link to each social destination to share.

The magic:

You will need the following: The original link, the embed link, and the social media share links as provided by the source platform.

For this example, I’m showing a share for a cute YouTube video of a cat and a chicken playing. Go ahead and watch it first. 🙂

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sNYIAQcCF9k

For the “copy this link and paste to share”, add it as HTML text in your email markup and style it as you would style any other text field.

<p>https://vimeo.com/111109711</p>

To add the link to your social sharing icons, first click on the share icon under the YouTube video.

Share Button on YouTube Video

This will open a popup with multiple share options. click on the social media icons for each account that you want to share to from the email. You will need to be logged in to each social account before doing this.

Share Youtube Video to Social Media Platforms

Clicking on the icon will open the social media account with the share messaging. Instead of sharing, copy the url from the address bar and add it to your link tag. You can include the tracking variable at the end as you would normally do. This example shows a link to facebook with a personalization data tag from Salesforce Marketing Cloud:

<a href="https://www.facebook.com/dialog/share?app_id=19884028963&display=popup&href=https%3A%2F%2Fvimeo.com%2F111109711%3Fref%3Dfb-share%261&redirect_uri=https%3A%2F%2Fvimeo.com%2F_facebook%2Flog_share%3Fclip_id&%%=v(@vPersData)=%%" alias="shareVidFB" target="_blank" >
                <img src="YOUR-FACEBOOK-ICON.jpg" alt="Share Video on Facebook" width="40" border="0" style="display:block;" ></a>

Another option to generate a share url is to use the tools on the site https://www.sharelinkgenerator.com/

The experience on phones may vary, just because phones/default clients/etc.

If a person is not signed in, then they will get the “sign in to share”, whether on phone or desktop.

The link for “copy paste” will be clickable on various email clients because email clients will automatically make the links clickable unless you go through some VERY fancy code hoops to make them not clickable (like when you are mentioning the brand.com in a text email and you don’t want it linked).  And the code to make them not clickable would mess with the copy/paste link. We would have the link go right to wherever the video lives. I

Additional Resources:

https://css-tricks.com/simple-social-sharing-links/