Twitter and Facebook Share Links

The easiest way to invite others to share your content on social sites is to link directly.

There is no need to sign up for third-party services that require your reader to give the third-party service their username and password. Instead, link directly to the social site and let the social site ask for login details.

Below are the share link formats for Twitter and Facebook. Twitter has two versions. Notes follow the formats.

Format for Twitter (version 1) direct share link:
https://twitter.com/intent/tweet?text=[MESSAGE]

Format for Twitter (version 2) direct share link:
https://twitter.com/intent/tweet?text=[MESSAGE]&url=[URL]

Format for Facebook direct share link:
https://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=[URL]

Twitter notes –

If using version 1, replace [MESSAGE] with the twitter text message. Maximum 140 characters (except URLs are considered to be only 20 characters even when longer).

If using version 2, replace [MESSAGE] with maximum of 120 characters and replace [URL] with a URL, presumably to a page with more information.

Facebook notes –

Replace [URL] with the URL of the page being shared.

Facebook will do a discovery to verify the page exists, to obtain an intro, and to obtain images. The user is then invited to type a message and to select the appropriate image.

Why I Do Share Links This Way

Some websites use third-party services for their sharing links. The third-party services require the site visitor's username and password to do the tweet or post the message.

No, I won't give third-party services like that my login information.

The links described above bypass all such third-party services. No need to sign up for them and make your site visitors vulnerable to their discretion.

Instead, just link directly to the social site itself. The easiest way.

These articles describe ways to automate the link generation:

Tweet and Share Buttons Your Way shows how to automatically insert share buttons into web pages without using Twitter or Facebook's API.

Generate Tweet and Share Links for Newsletters, Forums, Et Cetera has a generator to create share links for use in emails and newsletters, forums, blog comments and so forth.

Will Bontrager