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:

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

Biz Stone, co-founder of Twitter, and Tony Robbins will both be keynote speakers at the event. Other presenters will be covering a range of topics, from branding to social gaming, tweeting celebrities and beyond. We definitely look forward to stuffing our brains full of new and interesting information and are also excited about meeting some of our users on the west coast. If you’re in the area and want to say hi, just give us a shout.

As MailChimp’s list of social media features continues growing, it seems only natural for us to attend the Twitter Conference. Especially with our new Twitter Template and our recent research showing that Twitter is being used more frequently than Facebook in email marketing. Oh, and you also know that you can track tweets and re-tweets about your email campaigns in your MailChimp dashboard, right? Hey, and don’t forget about our built-in integration with Twitter and other social sites, mmkay?

* | MC:SHARE | *

When placed, it inserted a large row of social sites that your readers could share your newsletters with. One request we started receiving immediately after launching this was the ability to specify individual social sites (not all of them at once).

You can do that now. Here’s how…

* | SHARE:SITE_NAME1,SITE_NAME2 | *

for example if you only want digg in your email footer, you’d do this:

* | SHARE:digg | *

If you’d prefer 4 icons:

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

(note: I’ve added extra spaces to the merge tags in this blog post so that they render correctly for our RSS-to-Email subscribers. If you copy and paste from this post, the merge tags will not work.)

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.

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.

Below is a diagram of email conversations within a company, immediately after an important project missed a deadline.

The color nodes represent people.  Clusters of nodes represent people reporting to important people (the proverbial you-know-what “hitting the fan”). The company used this diagram to find out who the truly important team members were, and decide on how to “un-stuck” the failing project. Neat.

Orgnet is the company that ran the study. They specialize in the “measuring of industry ecosystems, uncloaking of conspiracies and data mining & visualization of diverse information.”