As the inclusion of social media driven insights into business management continues to grow, so we thought it might be nice to provide a simple getting-started post for those wishing to incorporate data in their pages and dashboards. Fortunately most social media services provide plug-in like options for web pages through public API's with JavaScript libraries, and since Page Composer and Application Composer provide support for adding regions built of raw HTML, the two fit nicely together.
To get started, the following video shows examples of adding YouTube videos and playlists, Twitter name and hashtag feeds, a Facebook update stream, and a LinkedIn company profile.
In addition to this demo, here is a bullet list summary of the most popular social media plug-in like features you can use in your page customizations.
Twitter provides a Widgets feature under your account Settings page. This has a number of tabs offering embed code generation, including user timelines and hashtag searches.
YouTube provides embed code for videos and playlists under the online share button, along with a range of other API's such as adding a subscribe button.
LinkedIn has some simple plug-in options for adding buttons and showing information, together with a full set of more advanced API features.
Facebook offers a broad set of plug-ins including the Like Box designed specifically for Pages.
Pinterest has a widget builder tool that allows you to add buttons, profiles, and full boards.
Slideshare offers simple iFrame embedding of content under the online share button, and as with others it includes full REST client APIs.
Google+ offers a multitude of plug-in features for recommending, sharing, and following.
Using the full suite of social media API's beyond plug-ins often requires pre-authentication and the processing of response documents and would therefore be most applicable to on-premise development, however even in SaaS instances you can include some dynamic results by passing in run-time application data. Examples include company name sent to an open search API's or a specific social media account name that has been captured (maybe in custom fields). In the simple example embedded below we use the city field from the address record to get a map from the Google Maps plug-ins.