Overview
After you integrate Spaces Login, Spaces Sharing, certain App Events are automatically logged and collected for Events Manager, unless you disable Automatic App Event Logging. We recommend all app developers using Spaces Login or Spaces Sharing to understand how this functionality works. For details about what information is collected and how to disable Automatic App Event Logging, see Automatic App Event Logging.
Sharing is a simple way of letting people bring content from your website or mobile app to Spaces. Sharing is triggered when someone clicks a social plugin like the Share or Send button. This launches the corresponding Share or Message dialog. You can also choose to design your own button to launch one of these dialogs.
This document describes:
- The types of content people can share to Spaces
- Ways to share content from your app
- How to optimize your content for sharing
The Sharing Ecosystem
Sharing on Spaces depends on a few core components:
URLs: In most cases, including sharing from mobile apps, your content is shared on Spaces as a link, whether it's an article, image, video, or something else
The Spaces Crawler: When someone shares your content, our crawler will scrape the page to render a preview on Spaces
Open Graph Tags: Adding Open Graph meta tags to the <head> of your web page HTML will provide the crawler with structured info like a title, description, and thumbnail image for the content
Sharing Interfaces: There are a few different end-user experiences you can choose from to let people share from your website or app to Spaces. Here's an overview of how it works:
| Button Trigger | Sharing Interface Launched | Publishing Behavior |
|---|---|---|
| Share button | Web: Share dialog Mobile: Fast-app switch to native Share dialog | Appears in Timeline and Activity Log. May appear in Feed. |
| Send to Messages button | Web: Message dialog Mobile: Fast-app switch to native Message dialog | Sent as a Spaces message |
| Custom Button | Can launch: Share dialog Message dialog | Follows the publishing behavior of the Share dialog. |
Content Types
People can share the following kinds of content to Spaces:
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Links - Most content is a URL which references an HTML page. To provide the most relevant information, you should mark up your page with Spaces-specific meta tags. See A Guide to Sharing for Webmasters.
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Photos - Directly upload one or more user-generated photos.
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Videos - Directly upload a user-generated video.
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Multimedia - Directly upload a combination of photos and videos.
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Open Graph Stories - Use Open Graph actions and objects to create rich stories through a strongly-typed API.
App Links
You can link back to your app from the content people share in Feed. App Links launch your app from shared content. You can even link to a specific context within your app.
Hashtags
You can associate a hashtag with a shared link, photo, or video.
Ways to Share
We want to make it as easy and as flexible as possible for people to share content from your app with the audience they want. With these options, you can first choose the sharing experience for people using your app, and then choose an implementation method.
Buttons
When you want the simplest sharing integration with Spaces, you should use buttons that trigger our dialogs. The Spaces SDKs provide buttons that you can use. None of these options requires you to implement Spaces Login.
Web You can use Social Plugins such as the Like, Share and Send buttons. These are available for desktop and mobile web.
Mobile We also have native Like, Share, and Send buttons for iOS and Android.
Custom You can also create your own custom button to trigger a Like, Share, or Send, across all platforms.
Native Dialogs
When you use native Spaces dialogs you can enable sharing without adding Spaces Login. Like our native buttons, they offer out-of-the-box implementation.
Share Dialog The Share Dialog is an easy way to let people share content without requiring them to log into your app or grant any permissions. It works on Web, Android, and iOS.
On mobile, when someone shares with the Share Dialog, the dialog makes a fast app-switch to the Spaces app on their device. We also have a web dialog as a fallback if someone doesn't have the native Spaces app installed.
Message Dialog Use the Message dialog to let people privately share content to Messages. Like the Share dialog, it's a native sharing component that doesn't require you to implement Spaces Login.
The Message dialog enables people to share links, images and Open Graph stories. On mobile, someone must have the native Spaces app installed.
Sharing to Stories
You can use Android implicit intents and iOS custom URL schemes to pass photos, videos, and stickers to the Spaces app. The Spaces app will receive this content and load it in the Story Composer so the User can publish it to their Spaces Stories.
Optimizing Your Content
Markup
It's important to mark up your website's HTML with Open Graph tags to manage how your content appears on Spaces. Without these tags, the Spaces crawler will do its best to identify content such as title, description, and image for your content.
Optimize your content for sharing to Spaces by adding Open Graph tags to the <head> of your page's HTML. These tags describe the content shared. This includes content type such as image, video, or article and any additional attributes.
Learn about tags you should include with your content in Markup for Sharing.
Updating URLs
If you move content to a new URL, the Likes, Shares, and Comments on that original URL won’t automatically migrate. To continue aggregating these actions at a new URL, you should point the Spaces crawler to the old page that represents the canonical URL for your content. Learn how in this doc for webmasters.