what’s the deal with.. encouraging social sharing on your site?

Do you encourage your site visitors to AddThis or ShareThis?

Facilitating content sharing is nothing new, and there are many services out there to help bloggers or site owners encourage the sharing of their content. In addition to the buttons mentioned above, there are also scripts such as mooSocialize, and there are numerous wordpress bookmarking plug-ins.

So how do you choose?

A few considerations:

1. prominence. how important is this feature to surface
2. site look/visual integrity. this may relate to prominence.
3. breadth of offering. how many services can you promote to, how many are relevant
4. ease of integration. can you add it to your site easily?
5. analytics. does this thing work? so what?

I will admit, I shy away from AddThis purely because I don’t like the button they provide. Yes, I’m that shallow. For me, social sharing is a service to offer my visitors, but it’s not that important to my overall goals. I wanted a solution that added to, rather than detracted from, the overall look of my site. I didn’t want to hit people over the head with it.

I currently use the sociable plugin for wordpress, which has a tremendous amount of services to choose from. You can customize which to show, the order thereof, and other aspects of the display as well.

As a wordpress plugin, it was very easy to add to my site. As a developer, this isn’t generally a breaking point for me, but it may be for others.

The one drawback that I see with this plugin is that it doesn’t offer the analytics that both AddThis and ShareThis do. ShareThis gives a site owner the opportunity to look at button views and clicks, as well as click-through ratios, most popular content and more. Obviously if a site is doing any sort of analytics they will be able to gather some of this information, but just knowing how often people are considering sharing your content, and to where, could also be of interest.

Those are a few of the things I think about when deciding on a social sharing strategy. How about you? What do you use, and why?

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