Last modified June 11, 2019 by John Mcgrath

How do I deeplink to social media pages?

Sites such as Facebook and Twitter provide URLs that make it very easy to post, tweet and share content from outside their platform. Swrve enables you to use these URLs in your in-app messages and Conversations to create effective social campaigns that make app-referring and content-sharing directly from your app a seamless experience.

Facebook

To encourage users to share content or refer your app on Facebook directly from an in-app message or Conversation, append the content or app URL to Facebook’s share URL: .

For example, if I wanted to encourage users to share Swrve’s website by tapping a button, the URL would be: https://www.facebook.com/sharer/sharer.php?u=http://swrve.com.

Twitter

Twitter enables you to prepopulate a user’s tweet text, so you can include a sample message in addition to the content you’re prompting them to share. To do this, simply add the message and the content URL to the standard tweet URL: https://twitter.com/intent/tweet?text=[tweet_content].

For example: https://twitter.com/intent/tweet?text=Go%20Giants%20http://espn.go.com/mlb/team/stats/batting/_/name/sf/san-francisco-giants.

Twitter also supports replying to specific tweets by adding the parameter, in_reply_to=[tweet_id]. For example, https://twitter.com/intent/tweet?in_reply_to=657262789795295232&text=@Swrve_Inc%20fun%20event.

To fetch the tweet ID, simply copy the specific tweet URL, and parse out the ID:

The in_reply_to_status_id parameter is ignored unless the author of the tweet this parameter references is mentioned in the status text. Therefore, you must include @username in the update, where username is the author of the referenced tweet.

Launch iOS apps

Facebook

If you would prefer to launch the Facebook app instead of opening the pages in the Safari browser, enter Facebook’s URL scheme in the deeplink field. To open the Facebook app, enter fb:// instead of .

Similar to the browser URLs, you can add parameters to the app URL schemes in order to direct users to specific screens in the app. For example, direct users to Swrve’s Facebook page in the iOS app by using fb://profile/240995729348595 (where 240995729348595 is Swrve’s Facebook ID).

While the Facebook app is one of the most highly installed apps in the App Store, not all users have it on their iOS device. If you deeplink to the Facebook app using the app’s URL scheme (that is, fb://) and the user does not have the app installed, the user is not directed anywhere. The in-app message or Conversation is simply dismissed.

Twitter

Users are automatically directed to the Twitter app if they have it installed on their device, so there is no need to use the Twitter app’s URL scheme.