Facebook Share on Steroids: viaima(ges)

Webmasters, bloggers, social media managers and Like-hunters, are you ready for awesome? Meet viaima (short for: via images), a brand new and free tool that lets you, and your visitors, share your posts using the maximum of available Facebook news feed estate.

When you click the regular Facebook Share button on a webpage or include a link in your status update, a thumbnail will automatically be added to the feed story. Now what if you could display three thumbnails, instead of one? Remember our post back when we reached 10,000 likes on our fan page? To achieve that effect ─kind of a profile hack avant la lettre─ we used Photoshop to carefully slice the image into three equal parts. Viaima creates all this eye-candy for you on-the-fly.

Social media publishing software provider, Vitrue, analyzed 32,000 posts made to more than 100 pages, visible to a total of 42.6 million Facebook users. Their research concluded that image posts are more engaging ─i.e. more comments, likes and shares─ than text and even video. If “one picture is worth a thousand words”, imagine what multiple images could do!

Here’s a 30-second demo video to give you an idea how viaima works:

Contrary to what you’d expect, viaima comes as a simple bookmarklet: a bookmark applet that adds one-click functionality to your browser or webpage. From the slicing of the thumbnail to embedding a text excerpt into an image, everything happens within the browser.

• Users just drag and drop the “share viaima” button to their favorites in order to enable it (if you’re using Google Chrome and don’t see the Bookmarks bar, hold Ctrl-Shift and press B to make it appear).
• Webmasters can easily grab the provided javascript code and add it to their pages along with optional customizations. Especially now that the Facebook Share Button appears to be depreciated ─try to access the Share Button code generator and you’ll end up on the Like Button page─ it would be a good time to replace or at least combine it with a viaima button.

Viaima was developed by Till Haunschild, the person behind PicScatter, and you can expect the same high level of professionalism in design and functionality here.

There are plenty of customization options available for free:

• Automatic picture recognition or upload your own
• Auto-recognition of Youtube and Vimeo videos: viaima retrieves the video thumbnail and displays a “play-icon”.
• Change the chosen image’s position, zoom level and the number of boxes it fills (up to three)
• Edit the title and text
• Post to a new or existing album

And some interesting premium features come at a small fee of $5.90 per month (subscription) or $49.90 prepaid for one year:

• Remove branding
• Use your own URL or shortener
• Post to Facebook Pages
• Coming soon: click-through rates and analytics and an archive of all shares

There’s a free 7-day premium trial for everyone who signs up. And everyone who “Likes” viaima gets a chance to win a free month of premium service in a monthly, random draw.

We already added viaima to Reface.me ─look for the red share-button in the floating box to your left and feel free to give it a try with any of our posts─ and we expect it to hit some major sites like Mashable or TechCrunch in the future. It’s just too appealing to ignore!