So I’m sure there are some easier ways to do this (the Salesforce community has some great authors out there), but I figured I would wing this and create a quick link to anyone’s linkedin page from the contact record. Since they removed the quick link button at the top a few years back, I’m asked for this a lot actually (and we can use this same train of thought for almost any other custom social media page, intranet URL, etc.).
So first things first, I’m going to add a new field called “LinkedIn ID” to my contact page. I’ll just add a text field, nothing huge here, maybe 50 characters. I won’t go through images here as I think most of us know how to add a field. In this case, we’ll call the ID anything after the “linkedin.com/in/” area of the URL (usually an id number, a name, or a string of characters).
After that’s made, go to Setup, search for “links” in the quick find. From there we’ll go to the Contact>Buttons, Links and Actions area. Once in there, click New Button or Link.
We’re going to fill out a few things:
- The label of the URL.
- The description.
- Where we show it (buttons, detail area) – go ahead and use their examples to see what each looks like.
- For behavior, I always choose “Display in New Window” — I think that’s best for most items.
- Leave it as a URL.
Now for the formula, we have to do some work here to put in the URL and then merge in that ID field we created earlier.
Save the link so we can add it to the page.
Once saved, go to your Contact layout screen (quick tip: open a contact, then click “edit layout” up top instead of going through setup).
At the top, scroll the left bar until you hit custom links. That’s where you’ll grab your new link and add to the page.
Add the link and try it out!
Now, we all know I could have just added a URL field to the page (which I’ve done before) and put in the whole URL for the page. However, this method is a nice way to do things internally, like grabbing a URL from an internal database using an ID string, a name search, etc.
After playing with it, you may also want to make it a button, which could work better for your team.
