💡 Vendor Live Status Social Cards with Deep Link Sharing

[github-actions[bot]]

Summary

Auto-generate shareable social cards per vendor showing live market-day status, product availability, and location. Cards render as rich OG previews on Instagram Stories, Facebook, WhatsApp, iMessage, and X. Tapping opens the app via Universal/App Links (or falls back to a web view for non-users), driving viral acquisition through the channels vendors already use.

Market Signal

Farmish has 40,000+ farms with static profiles but no competitor generates real-time status shareable links. Vendors already share on Instagram and Facebook manually — 2026 social sharing best practices show OG-tagged links with 1200x630 previews consistently outperform plain URLs across all social platforms. Expo Router now has mature deep linking support with Universal Links (iOS) and App Links (Android) built in, making implementation straightforward.

User Signal

Vendor persona Brad currently texts managers and posts to Instagram hoping followers see his status. The PRD identifies vendor discoverability and follower growth as key success metrics (10+ new followers per vendor in 90 days). No existing feature addresses the viral acquisition gap between vendor social presence and app installs. This is the missing growth loop: vendor activity → social sharing → customer discovery → app install → follow → retention.

Technical Opportunity

Expo Router supports Universal Links and App Links natively. React Native for Web provides the server-rendered fallback for non-app-users. The existing Firebase Realtime sync means the web view can show live vendor status without additional backend work. The GraphQL schema already exposes vendor status and product data. OG meta tags would be generated server-side by the Go backend via a lightweight /vendor/:id/card endpoint. The domain event bus could trigger card regeneration on status changes.

Assessment

Dimension	Score	Rationale
Feasibility	high	Uses existing Expo deep linking, Go web endpoints, and Firebase Realtime data. No new infrastructure required.
Impact	high	Creates viral acquisition loop — the missing growth mechanism. Each vendor share potentially reaches hundreds of followers.
Urgency	high	Needed before market-day launch to maximize vendor-driven customer acquisition during the critical early adoption phase.

Adversarial Review

Strongest objection: Social media algorithms de-prioritize posts with external links. Vendors might get less reach sharing a link than a photo.

Rebuttal: The primary distribution is Instagram Stories (link sticker), WhatsApp groups, and direct messages — not algorithm-ranked feed posts. In these contexts, links perform well. The generated card image can also be shared AS a photo with a link-in-bio. This is strictly more useful than the current manual photo approach because it includes live status and a one-tap follow action.

Suggested Next Step

Design the social card template (mobile mockup + OG preview format), implement the /vendor/:id/card web endpoint in the Go backend with OG meta tags, and configure Expo deep linking to handle inbound URLs. Start with a static card and iterate to real-time status display.