If you’re using a blogging platform like Wordpress, you may be like me. I added the plugin Sociable to make it easy for visitors to bookmark pages and share the blog’s content on social networking sites.
However, I never really got around to adding that capability to our regular websites – until now. Today, if you visit our main real estate marketing website, or our Point2 Agent real estate website, you’ll see an “Add This” widget right under the menu on each site.
You can get one, too. It’s easy. . . and free!
AddThis.com
All you need to do is visit www.AddThis.com. You’ll find a pretty smart little widget available for free. The widget works well to let your visitors share your page with a very large collection of services. Beyond the basic functionality, here’s why this is a smart widget:
- The widget is automatically updated when new services are added to the AddThis Directory. You don’t have to worry about updating the code.
- The widget is automatically translated into the language of the visitor’s browser, and it currently supports over 50 languages.
- The widget customizes itself to your visitor’s preferences. If a visitor has two favorite places to share information, those two choices will be shown to them first!
- Analytics are available. You can choose to receive weekly reports showing the activity of visitors using the widgets. The reports will tell you things like which content is shared most often, which services are used most often, and some geographic information about the users.
I created two accounts at AddThis to track each of our websites separately. The widgets haven’t been active long enough to have any information yet, but if there’s anything interesting to tell, I’ll include it in a future post.
If you choose to, you can also customize the look of the widget. I didn’t do that because I think people are familiar with the default image, and I didn’t want to do anything to confuse them!
Have you been using this type of a widget? If so, let us know what your experience has been. In theory, it should increase traffic to your website as others find the content your visitors have shared.
