Sharing eBooks with Hyperlinks in InDesign
In the world of digital marketing, links are vital. Links provide a way for readers/ viewers to read more of your content, visit more of your pages, and share your content for others to see. The ability to share content gives it an opportunity to go viral, but also provides an opportunity to simply widen the viewing community and brand awareness.
Digital Firefly Marketing has released a series of free ebooks available for download on our site. Once downloaded, viewers can still share these books on a variety of social media platforms because we’ve imbedded hyperlinks in InDesign prior to exporting as a PDF.
Getting the Most out of Your Design
Once you’ve created your ebook in InDesign, you’re ready to set your links. First, you’ll need the codes that tell the link where to share the information. These codes are the beginning of a URL that will link your content directly to the designated social media network. Lets hyperlink our “Share on Facebook” first. The URL code for Facebook sharing is http://facebook.com/share.php?u
Copy the landing page address of your content and paste directly onto the end of this code. For example, if we wanted to share DFM.com it would be like this. http://facebook.com/share.php?u=digitalfireflymarketing.com Copy this URL and save for later.
Back in InDesign, open up the Hyperlinks window by Window>Interactive>Hyperlinks.
Hyperlinks
Select the words, photo, or object you would like to have linked. Here, we will select the Facebook Icon. Then, in the hyperlink menu, click the dropdown option on the right as we have shown, and choose New Hyperlink.
New Hyperlink
Paste the copied URL into the destination and choose OK. Your hyperlink has been set. Repeat the process for all the social media networks you would like (note: sharing a “tweet” is a bit more complicated. See below for further details.)
New Hyperlink Twitter
When you export the PDF with all the hyperlinks, be sure to export as an Interactive PDF—otherwise the links will remain dormant.
Interactive PDF
Lastly, once you’ve exported the PDF, double check that all your links work properly before putting your content online. This way, you can insure everyone who wants to share your content is able to.
For LinkedIn:
http://www.linkedin.com/cws/share?url=
For Google+:
https://plusone.google.com/_/+1/confirm?hl=en&url=
For Twitter:
As we said before, Twitter sharing is a bit more complicated. First, write out the tweet you’d like to have shared. Make sure you leave 20+ characters for people to add their own text. Also create a custom hashtag so you can analyze the sharing statistics of this post. For instance, we might say “@Digitalfirefly1 has released its newest ebook #SEOExperts http://bit.ly/vPyHJH.” Because you only have 160 characters, you must change your landing page URL to an abridged URL. We typically use bit.ly (https://bitly.com/)
Next copy your status (and bit.ly URL) and paste onto the end of the Twitter Sharing URL.
Here is the tricky (and tedious) part. Replace every space with + and every hashtag with %23. So, our new link would look like this:
When shared, the status will automatically appear in the tweet box.
Post a Tweet
Now, every piece of content you create is able to link back to your site. This is why #welovedigitalmarketing.