MailChimp and Autoposting to Facebook
If you’ve been following my blog, or maybe you’re a client of mine, either way, you’ll know that I’m a big fan of MailChimp, my (and many other’s) email newsletter application of choice. I generally find it intuitive to use and a straight forward process to send out newsletters (aka campaigns) but like any program, there’s a learning curve involved and once you’ve used it a few times, it’ll soon feel like you’re a pro, just like riding a bike really.
One feature that many businesses use is autoposting your newsletter link to either (or both) Facebook and Twitter. This in itself isn’t a new thing but recently MailChimp made it easier to customise how this link is displayed on social media. If done correctly, your online community will see something like this:
All four elements highlighted above are customisable in MailChimp before you send out your campaign. Often this is a feature that is overlooked and when MailChimp autoposts to Facebook, your post can be understated and lacking in enticement for your community to read more.
So it’s handy to know where to go in MailChimp to customise this feature. Before we dive in, I’m going to make the assumption that you already have a MailChimp account and you know generally know the steps involved with sending out your campaigns. If you’d like to know more about email newsletters, get in touch with me.
Let’s get started. Create a new campaign within MailChimp and when you get to the SETUP section of the process, scroll down to the Social Media area. Ensure you have connected MailChimp to your Facebook account and type in the short blurb #1… see the example above to see where this info will be placed on the Facebook post.
You can see that I’ve only chosen to autopost my campaign onto my Facebook business page. It’s up to you if you’d like it to be posted to your personal page as well.
Next we want to customise the actual social card, which we can do on the DESIGN section. Once you have added the content to your newsletter, maybe with one or two images, go to Preview & Test and select Social Cards, as shown below.
In the Social Card editing screen, enable your customised card and then choose to preview the Facebook post on the left. You are able to choose one of the images you have already added to your newsletter using the Back and Next buttons. Add a meaningful and engaging title and type in the Short Blurb #2.
Click Save & Close. And that’s it. Continue to perfect your newsletter and send it out to your peeps. Your MailChimp autopost on Facebook (and Twitter if you use it) will now be extra enticing for your community to want to read more. Happy days!
About the Author: Ange Hammond
Hi Ange,
This is a wonderful article, I would love to know how to connect my business page to mailchimp and I can’t seem to work it out. How were you able to do this?
I really liked the article, it was very helpful thank you.
Tess
Hi Tess, there are a couple of ways of connecting MailChimp and Facebook. One of them is when you’re creating a new campaign, go to the SETUP tab and scroll down to the Social Media section (as shown above in the post). When you tick “Autopost to Facebook”, MailChimp will ask you for your Facebook login details…these are for your personal page. Automatically your Facebook business page will come up as another option for your autopost. Hope that makes sense! x
How or where do I find the tracking for people who click on a link (or the social card itself) in an auto-post on Facebook? I’ve done the integration, but would really like to know who clicks on the FB post. We’re trying to build our subscriber list and want to know whether those clicking on the FB link would subscribe if they were personally invited.
Hi Sherry, this link may help with your query: https://kb.mailchimp.com/integrations/google-analytics/integrate-google-analytics-with-mailchimp
Hi Angela! Have you had any issues recently since Mailchimp has changed design? I was formerly able to auto-post to Facebook with a featured picture, but now the autopost only shows text without the picture.
Hi Sammi, I haven’t had that problem since MailChimp changed the setup slightly. Maybe check the size of your image? It needs to be big enough for Facebook to post it and landscape orientation is best. Hope that helps