Persistent Social Share tool

[adriancrook]

Problem Statement

• As a site visitor, I would like to easily be able to share the page I'm viewing on my social channels, so that I can tell my friends about TELUS' social purpose programs.

Recommendation

• These social share toolbars are prevalent throughout the web, but a good place to look for a desktop and mobile implementation would be Daily Hive (this article, for example: https://dailyhive.com/vancouver/translink-delays-snow-january-2020).

On desktop, the social share tool appears vertically on the left hand side of the article and scrolls with the user. On mobile, the bar appears horizontally, pinned to the bottom.

This bar allows the user to share content easily on their social networks (facebook, whatsapp, FB messenger, wechat, twitter), as well as simply copying the URL itself. It opens a new window with the respective social network's draft panel open, the content prepopulated with the article headline and link.

Daily Hive uses the addthis.com service for this functionality, in case that's worth studying for further reference.

The TELUS Digital blog uses a block that comes close to this functionality (see https://www.telus.com/en/digital/blog/automated-accessibility-testing-TELUS for an example, right hand side), but there are several issues with it. It's not vertically oriented, doesn't scroll with article, lacks some popular social channels, and looks not like a social share tool but instead like the article author's social bio links.

NOTE: Brand Experience pages are looking for a prominent social share tool because our primary KPIs are awareness and engagement, hence the importance of having people share our content. We're a bit different than the other pages on T.com, where all that is probably secondary to ecomm conversion.

Design intent

(This space is intentionally left blank. The motivation and design intent go here.)

Designs

• Screenshots
• Sketch file
• InVision links

Acceptance criteria

This section is intentionally left blank. See story writing process.

User stories

(This section is intentionally left blank. User stories and acceptance criteria go here.)

Example:

Scenario: Displaying the component

Given text is provided
Then the text is displayed as a child
And the text size matches core-text medium

Out of scope

(This section is intentionally left blank. Features or items that were deliberately left out of scope during design intent or may be mistaken as within scope are noted here. Link to related issues if possible.)

Meta

• Willing to design solution: Yes/No
• Willing to develop solution: Yes/No
• Has workaround: Yes/No
• Do any similar components already exist in TDS (core or community): Yes/No
• Does this pattern exist already but isn’t a community component? (include url)
• Which teams/applications do you think would use this improvement?
• High impact: Yes/No

[varunj90]

DPA discussion

[Laurel] Request from HS R&L as well (deals and bundles page): opportunity to explore together
[Apurv] how does it work with personalization?
[Fabio] Stats from any pages live on how people use this (industry-wide and TELUS?)
[Donna] For design exploration: Potentially a FAB (floating action button); can expand to show more options
Unique component (social share) altogether or unique component that utilizes Button/NavButton interactions
TDS and CX are in discussions to evaluate use of social media icons, and buttons, and social share component
[Elena] Currently a version of it on blog page: https://www.telus.com/en/digital/blog/digital-coffee-architech-mahedi (Elena is working on making it visually more appealing)
[Adrian] we should also analyze what channels we use to share

Next steps

• Adrian can kickstart a research; Fran could support design.

[adriancrook]

It's been tough to find objective research on how much social share tools are used.

This post from 2018 states:

• 29% of shares are done via a site's share buttons.
• Facebook is shared to 2x more than twitter.
• Taken together, WhatsApp, FB Messenger, and email shares are greater than Facebook - speaking to importance of including messaging share functions on a share tool.
• Facebook, WhatsApp, Email, Twitter, Facebook Messenger and copy+paste sharing account for 99% of all shares - i.e. more marginal social networks are not likely worth including.

I've contacted Farhan of Daily Hive and he's looking into his site's social share analytics. I'll update this if he gets back with numbers.