Google+ API: Sharing An Interactive Post

The Google+ API allows you to create interactive posts you can share from your website, which contain a call-to-action button with an image and details from the link you want to share. The API lets you pre-fill the text the user can use to share your link (something which Facebook as removed from their API), and gives you options to add in deep-links for mobile apps too.

The code below shows how easy it is to create a interactive share button, with a few lines of JavaScript and some HTML to render the button.

	<div class="well">
	<button
	class="g-interactivepost btn btn-info"
	data-contenturl="https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.cagecricket.app"
	data-contentdeeplinkid=""
	data-clientid="xxxxx.apps.googleusercontent.com"
	data-cookiepolicy="single_host_origin"
	data-prefilltext="Download the Cage Cricket application and easily record your scores for this great urban-friendly version of Cricket."
	data-calltoactionlabel="INSTALL_APP"
	data-calltoactionurl="https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.cagecricket.app"
	data-calltoactiondeeplinkid="">
	Tell your friends
	</button>
	</div>

	<!-- Place this asynchronous JavaScript just before your </body> tag -->
	<script type="text/javascript">
	(function() {
	var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true;
	po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/client:plusone.js';
	var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s);
	})();
	</script>

view raw google+_share.html hosted with ❤ by GitHub

You can customise the following attributes:

data-contenturl – the URL you want to share
data-contentdeeplinkid – the deep-link URL
data-clientid – Client ID from Google APIs Console
data-prefilltext – The text you want to pre-fill for the user
data-calltoactionlabel – label for your call-to-action button, see the full list here.
data-calltoactionurl – URL for the call-to-action button. The content URL and the call-to-action URL must match for the post to work.
data-calltoactiondeeplinkid – the deep-link URL for the call-to-action

It is currently not possible to track sharing of the interactive post, but it is possible using the standard Share button.

Google APIs, Google+, JavaScript

2 comments on “Google+ API: Sharing An Interactive Post”

Ivan says:

September 25, 2015 at 9:40 PM

Hi,

Is it possible to receive a callback after successful share?
Thank you,
Ivan.

- Niraj Shah says:
  
  September 30, 2015 at 9:52 AM
  
  No. Google+ does not send callback on share, only when pressing the button. So you cannot correctly determine if the user actually shared a post.

2 comments on “Google+ API: Sharing An Interactive Post”

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