Facebook Games

Sharing for Instant Games

By adding sharing in your game, your players can share their game activity to their profile and into their friends' Feeds. This one-to-many communication channel is a powerful driver of player acquisition and engagement. As all shared stories are published directly to a player's profile, it is important to build a high quality, intuitive sharing flow into your game. This guide will help you determine the best sharing approach for your game.

When designing your games, define specific moments that give players a meaningful experience (e.g., a feeling of personal accomplishment, an exquisite victory by a friend, or a celebration of a team effort) and give players clear options to share these moments as they happen. We recommend at least one prominent Share button on a results page or other relevant pages.

Custom Sharing

As a developer, you enable your players to share a game's meaningful moments. The SDK call works similarly to the Custom Updates call, but instead of updating content in the current conversation, the method FBInstant.shareAsync() prompts the player to share the moment elsewhere.

Players can share moments in their Feed. If they share it in their Feed, they can include a custom message.

The Feed story will contain an image, text, and a button, which are all set when calling the API. Clicking the button launches the game. From that entry point, you'll have access to FBInstant.getEntrypointData(), which returns the data object passed via the data: argument in FBInstant.shareAsync().

When producing visual assets for custom shares, be sure to comply with Feed's sizing standards for image and video attachments. The ratio between the width and height of the asset should be in the following range:

  • The minimum ratio of width to height is 1.91:1.
  • The maximum ratio of width to height is 4:5. Images that exceed the maximum ratio will be cropped.

You can share your game in the Feed by click Share in the Share Your Game section. This will allow you to share the game in the Feed and test it from any surface (Desktop, iOS or Android).



fb.gg/play Deeplinks

You can kick off your virality by sharing your game on Facebook. If you have associated a Page with your game, you can create a link with the following format:

https://fb.gg/play/app_id_or_namespace

You can share this link anywhere, and tapping on it will take people to your game and launch it instantly.

It also allows specifying a context name: https://fb.gg/play/app_id_or_namespace/play_with_jill

"play_with_jill" is the context name and you can specify any URL-safe string you want. When users access your game from a link with a context name, this will be mapped to a unique context ID, with context type “LINK”. Everyone who receives the same link can play together. This allows you to run tournaments, send out unique challenges, and so on.



Custom fb.gg/play Deeplinks

You can also create custom shareable links with payloads from the "Discovery Configuration" section of your Instant Game settings by doing the following:

  • Enter valid JSON data in the "Payload" text area:


  • Press the "Create Custom Link" button, a new link will be generated and added to the links table:


You can now copy any link by clicking on it:



The link will be resolved to an Instant Games link and open the game with the payload that can be retrieved using FBInstant.getEntryPointData().

  • Payloads can be edited anytime from the table:

Sharing Use Cases

Share with Friends

Sharing games and posts to Feed is a powerful way to help your games go viral.

Look for Friends to Play

Looking for friends to play with is a great driver for users to share the game they are playing:

Share The Game from UI

If your players are having fun with the game (e.g., playing for long time, returning multiple days, etc.), you may want to suggest they share the game with their friends by clicking on the top right menu button: this will allow them to share a video of your game on their timeline. Be sure to upload a nice video into your App Settings.

Encouraging Sharing vs. Incentivizing

Encourage your players to share the meaningful moments you identified and designed in-game. Prompt them to use a share flow by using FBInstant.shareAsync(). This method is good for sharing achievements and accomplishments.

Note: Giving players rewards in return for sharing the game is against Facebook Policy. You can reward sharing users and friends joining who have received the shared content only after they start playing. For example, Player A can't receive a gift just for inviting another player. However, Player A can receive a reward if they invited Player B, and Player B has started playing. Player B can also receive a reward in this scenario.

Prepare for Scale

It's important to make sure your game can support lots of new players. Ensure there is a strong new user experience that's localized for multiple languages, and make sure the game supports the other best practices for engagement and retention.