Removing Lengthy URL from Twitter custom message using unbounce social widget

Hi Anand, 

Did you manage to get this working yourself? I loaded up your page and tried the click-to-tweet and I’m not seeing any URL in the tweet. After looking into this a bit further, it appears you’ve done _exactly _what we would have recommended you to do and embedded a custom social widget via HTML. To those who might be wondering, this is a super easy way to completely customize the message/link that’s shared via Twitter, and it’s as easy to set up as pasting some code into your Unbounce page. To start by customizing your Twitter widget, head over to the Official Twitter Button Creator here: 
https://about.twitter.com/resources/buttons#tweet

Good job in getting this working, Anand!

Hi Anand - The social widget is something that we added pretty early on to the Page Builder, so you’re 100% right that there is some functionality that could be added.

It is something that we’d consider at some point, but since it’s pretty easy to just embed Twitter’s custom widgets and there is some research to suggest that adding social widgets to most landing pages can hurt your conversion rate (since it increases attention ratio), it’s not something that’s a high priority right now.

Quinn, you’re right the social buttons might be a traffic leak, that’s why Unbounce should optimize for putting them on the thank you page. But since the twitter button is automatically loading the resident URL, it will tweet out your thank you page URL instead of the sales page, or website root, or anything else we would want to be tweeted instead of the thank you page.

Hence, that’s a reason it should be a priority, not a reason for it not to be. The twitter button is functionally useless. As for twitter’s custom widgets, it’s nice to have a standard design with the other buttons, not having each button a different size and shape.

That’s only if you’re using the popup as a thank you page, not making a second page and redirecting.

I think it would be really simple to remove that URL from preloading, and the customers that want that URL there can manually add it in to their tweet.

“Twitter’s widget is something that pretty much any Unbounce user can handle”

This is not a productive outlook to have. Just because a person is creating landing pages doesn’t mean they are fluent with the nuances of social media. You also have multiple different icon styles, so by saying go by twitter’s you are now limiting your customers options to one after previously presenting to them several. Now you can say “but you can customize twitter icons!” OK so now you are expecting the customer to familiarize themself with the nuances of social media and their javascript functions.This is also after you have a guide already posted to use ShareThis if you want custom icons:

http://support.unbounce.com/entries/2…

Which is great and all but when some of the ShareThis buttons aren’t loading either for whatever reason, and now I’m googling tutorials on how to customize twitter buttons, it just doesn’t lead to a great user experience. All because somebody thought they would read their customers mind on which URL they wanted to tweet out.

And not to mention, you have a service that’s pretty much 100% oriented towards streamlining user experience. You might as well say creating landing pages via HTML and CSS is something that pretty much any unbounce user can handle, since now we are getting into coding.

Thanks Anand, I actually didn’t copy that as it was an image but it’s really easy what i was trying to do. To get the “vertical count” style you just add: data-count="vertical" in the code that the twitter button gives you. It’s just a pain having to look things up while getting bounced into different directions.