Hey Amanda, you’ve made me think! Always a good thing
Yes, I think that the functions you’ve listed can be defined as ‘social media integrations’. For me however, I think of an additional function when in think of that phrase. I think of the fluency between Patreon and whichever social media platform we wish to integrate. That means the sharing of posts and findability which you’ve listed, but also the ability to put the button code into something like Facebook and be able to create a subscriber facility on out pages (like Mailchimp has for example).
I might be totally barking up the wrong tree, but that’s what came to mind.
As an avid social media marketer (and former silicon valley Technical Product Manager), I wouldn’t consider the first one to be a “social media integration.” Technically, maybe. Not in any meaningful sense of the word.
To me, that’s just basically just sharing & links.
Integration implies that you’re making some kind of data link between the two platforms.
If you supported Facebook Pixel, now THAT would be an awesome integration. Being able to pass traffic & conversion data from Patreon to FB would be huge – especially because FB does all the heavy lifting once the Pixel is integrated.
If you used any of the Facebook Login features such as for the 2nd bullet point – so that Patrons could sign up for Patreon using their FB Credentials, I would consider that a “social media integration.” It’s actually taking data and passing it between the two platforms for the purposes of enhancing / easing the use of both platforms.
Another cool integration would be if, in the email notifications, there were already “Share on Facebook” and “Share on Twitter” and “Share on Pinterest” and “Share on Tumblr” links. So people could read an email, and share directly from there.
Thanks for your feedback, it’s really helpful!
We actually do allow both patrons and creators to sign up using FB login (I just forgot to mention that in my post! – editing to add it now! ).
You mentioned FB a couple of times, is this the most important social media integration for you?
The social media outlets that are currently most important to me are YouTube, Facebook and Instagram, with Twitter and LinkedIn more distantly important. Right now, I’m happy with how the links to my Patreon posts look in FB. The link to Instagram is much more difficult, since they don’t allow linking, unless it’s a business account, so I’m always having to change the link in my profile. I don’t know what kind of linking you could do with IG, but if there was a way to make a post clickable directly to Patreon, that would be awesome.
Regarding YouTube, I believe you are working on making the videos unlockable by tier in the near future? This will be a cool resource for me, as right now I just make them public and then Thing them to all my Patrons. Is there a way for me to Thing something for only one tier? I thought not.
Twitter and LinkedIn are similar low use platforms for me - it would be nice to have a short URL for twitter posts.
Could we get hashtag integrations with any of these tools?
Though I market on other platforms like pinterest & Instagram (not Twitter, for me), there aren’t any key integrations I’m looking for from Patreon.
I do also have a lot of YouTube activity. I’m not sure what integrations there make sense - though I’d be curious what your team might come up with to drive people from YouTube over to Patreon, or possibly a way for people watching my videos on Patreon to directly subscribe to my YouTube channel. I don’t know if YouTube APIs support either of those… just some potential ideas.
Can you tell me a little bit more about how and when you’re posting your Patreon content to other platforms? Unfortunately, we don’t have much direct control over how posts on other platforms display (even if they are posts linking to your Patreon), but we’d still like to get a pulse of when creators think this is a useful thing to do.
I know we’re doing some work on how videos function on Patreon, but I’m not sure about the specifics. It sounds like you might benefit from using unlisted Youtube videos and posting the link in a Patreon post to specific tiers, though.
Can you tell me more about you what mean for a “short URL for twitter posts”? Do you mean a short url from Patreon to post into Twitter?
Can you tell me more about what you mean by hashtag integrations?
I post links of my Patreon posts to Facebook groups very regularly. It works well, gives the title clearly.
I have to go make tiny.url or bit.ly links for Twitter posts, and a short link from Patreon would save me time.
I’d love to hashtag my posts on Patreon so they can be searched on the internet by hashtag the way twitter and instagram can. Maybe this is already possible if I just added the hashtags?
– editing to add it now! ).