By now, we’re all pretty familiar with the "share" widgets around the web that enable viewers to easily create a bookmark, email and/or an ad of sorts back to your site. Chicklets, as they are sometimes called, can be the most effective plugin in your viral marketing bag of tricks. By making your article, video and even rich media files easier to share, you are greatly increasing your traffic potential and, indirectly, your SEO.
AddThis and ShareThis are two of the more popular providers of this handy JavaScript widget. I most often see these used in a pared-down fashion, so I thought it might be valuable to shed light on some of the other things you can do with them.
1. Customize. With a few simple tweaks, you can "season" your chicklets to taste.
- Create your own branded button and pop-up.
- Choose to display sharing service icons and format the display however you like (with AddThis, there’s even a cool
Lightbox option).
- Download custom service icons.
- Translate the widget UI into other languages for regional sites.
- Opt for menu offset and have the share pop-up open in a new browser window.
2. Install. With a little extra effort, you can embed the widget into Flash.
3. Define. Image, title and description that appear on your share ad. Otherwise, title and description will be automatically generated from metadata (assuming you have metadata). In cases where they haven’t been defined and there is no metadata, source code can appear instead (within your ad). So it’s better to define them up front. And unless you want Facebook, for example, to grab a random image for thumbnail use, specify that as well.
4. Analyze. It all comes down to analytics. Track and filter sharing trends by geography, date range, which sites your content is most frequently being posted to, etc.
5. Remember. A couple more tips to make it as easy as possible to share:
- Store all items you’ve shared in a single location, for your own (private) reference.
- Add a button to your browser toolbar, so that you can share pages that haven’t included a share widget.
Note: As with all trusted plugins, AddThis and ShareThis claim not to install adware or spyware and do not share personally identifiable information.