Harness the Power of Web 2.0 with AddThis
My last Tech Beat article, “What the Heck is Social Media Marketing,” was an introduction to how businesses can better expose their product and service offerings for free using “Web 2.0” technologies (interactive, social aspects of the Web emerging over the past several years). One premise for that article was that if you have a business in this first decade of the 21st century, you really should have a website for your business. In this article, I’d like to show you how easy it is to add the power of social media sharing to your website.
Social media is a broad umbrella arching over a variety of media that facilitate sharing of information and networking among friends and followers. Three of the best known and most popular nodes are Facebook, MySpace and Twitter. These are all media popular among widening demographics and as such offer powerful marketing opportunities to businesses with websites. That is, there are already networks of millions of people sharing all manner of content through these media . . . And you could be just one click away from them. Best of all, it’s free and easy.
Allow me to introduce you to AddThis. AddThis provides a free “widget” to boost traffic back to your site by making it easier for visitors to share your content with their friends and followers. Their tag line is “Your Content. Everywhere.” By adding AddThis to your site, you put your visitors a click away from broadcasting your content over a wide array of social networks.
For example, if you are reading this article on the Eureka Times Standard’s website, you will see an icon to “Bookmark”; mouse over this icon, and you’ll be presented with options to share on Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Google Bookmark, and more. This is integrated into Times-Standard.com using the AddThis widget.
Recently my sister got a patent on a product she had been developing - a simple way to deal with messy diaper changes. I built her a rather simple website to promote and sell her product, and of course, I added AddThis to every page. I opted for the “Share” version of the icon, and a different set of options for sharing - including Facebook, MySpace and Twitter, of course, but also other popular sharing locations such as Digg, Delicious and StumbleUpon, as well as some “old school” options: “Add to Favorites”, “Email a Friend,” and Print. To see this example, visit www.BottomsUpBabbyGear.com.
You can add this functionality to your website too, quickly and easily - for free. Simply visit www.AddThis.com and follow the four simple steps. First, select a service (the integration will differ a bit depending on whether you are integrating into your existing website, a hosted blog, or MySpace; unfortunately, Facebook pages are not structured in such a way as to make it possible to add this). Next, select a button style from the options provided.
Step three is worth a note of explanation. You have the option to add a free analytics account enabling you to gather metrics on what pages your visitors are sharing and how they are sharing these pages. I highly recommend that you register an account for this option to track the performance of your AddThis button.
Finally, generate the code snippet you will insert into your website or blog.
This is the simple integration - the one the Time Standard has used, for example. Anyone can do it. However, there are more options for button styles and options to customize which share icons you show on the mouse over (out of nearly 300 options) that are also easy to add to your web site. For the more technically savvy, there are more advanced options for the integration of the display on your site and the share options you would like to provide. It’s the best of both worlds for those who just want a simple solution on the one hand, or those that are more particular about their site design and the specific options they want to provide their visitors.
If you have a website for your business and you do not have some option such as AddThis for your visitors to share your content, then I fear you are missing the boat on what Web 2.0 and social media networking are doing to transform the ways people are interacting with web locations and each other as we approach the second decade of the 21st century. With AddThis, it’s so simple and easy to add this connectivity to your website or blog, I can’t imagine why you wouldn’t.
I plan to write a follow-up article on adding these sharing options to business websites for my next article, and I welcome your feedback on how using share options on your website has affected your business. If you add AddThis or another similar method to your website, please email me at AddThis@WMSMerchantServices.com and tell me your story. Meanwhile, keep following Tech Beat to learn about other ways Web 2.0 might affect your business.
(Please Note: AddThis is in no way affiliated with Web Merchant Services; it‘s simply a tool we recommend to our clients).
Tags: AddThis, share, social media marketing, Web 2.0