What if there was a way to guarantee more players to your games, and more visitors to your sites or Flash applications, that was free and only took 2 minutes of your time? Well there is!

Social media is huge, and it has taken the Flash games industry by storm these last couple of years, but few Flash game developers are relaly taking advantage of it yet.

Porting games to the Facebook platform is a great way to increase your exposure, but that can be a little complicated and I’ll cover that in a future post. Also HeyZap recently launched “HeyZap Viral” which allows highscores to be posted as Facebook or Twitter status updates, and again I’ll be writing a full tutorial on that very soon, but today I have something even better, and even easier to implement for you…

Flash Social Media Buttons

This is a free component I’ve developed which allows you to drag and drop social media buttons right into your games. It contains buttons for 20 of the most popular social media sites, including Digg, reddit, Fark, Delicious, Twitter and more. It’s easy to use, and you can customise it using as few or as many buttons as you like – oh and did I mention, it’s free!

Want to see it in action? Here’s a modified version of the simple game we built in yesterday’s tutorial on how to build Flash games. You’ll see a “Share This” button on the intro screen, and a different one on the game over screen, so give it a try…

Cool huh!

This makes it really easy for players to share games, and spread them virally on networks like Twitter, Facebook and Digg…

There’s no scripting required. All the actionscript code is contained within the buttons so just drag and drop the ones you want to use into any Actionscript 3.0 project and you’re good to go! The submission uses the game’s current URL, so no matter what page the game is on, that’s what will be submitted (though of course that can also be tweaked with if you wish).

Here’s a preview of just some of the different button types, but they’re easy to customise so you can always just use the code and create your own actual buttons:

So, if you like it please first of all leave a comment, and submit this page to a social network of your choosing to spread the word, then click here to download your free component and start adding social media integration to your Flash games and applications!

Download the Flash social media buttons components

Share |