How to Use the 'AddThis' Social Bookmarking Service
By
Social networking has become an important part of the Web. Having your visitors share a link to your site can help to increase your traffic and potentially increase your profits. In the past, having a "Refer a Friend" script was really all that was needed. However, with the creation of Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Reddit and other social networking sites, it's become more complex.
Over time, different methods have been created for adding links to social media network sites. Some of those methods call for a script you maintain on your own server. Others are maintained by the script creators themselves.
The problem with scripts maintained by you is just that — they're maintained by you. It's up to you to keep them up-to-date. While the existing URL's may not change, you'll need to keep up with new social bookmarking sites, as well as obtaining their icons and adjusting the code to provide links to them and adding in the icons. That's time better used for adding content to your site, or other money-making features.
Why Reinvent the Wheel?
There's an easier way. Several sites provide everything you need. One of them is AddThis. AddThis has built a respectable clientele: FOX, Time magazine, Oracle and WebMD, to name a few. These are organizations that could easily hire, or already have in-house, the technical expertise to create their own scripts. Since it's already been created, why reinvent it? We also use it on many of our sites, including: WebReference, JavaScript Source and Script Search.
There's no reason to create something that already exists, especially when it has been done well. Using a quality, pre-made system allows you to take care of other things, while someone else takes care of one of the small — but no less important — things. And, the service is free! It's also available for the following blogging systems: TypePad, Blogger, and WordPress.
At this time the widget is set up to link to the following social networking sites:
|
|
|
|
You don't need to use all of those links. You can select the ones you do want and that's all that will appear. In addition, it features an e-mail link with a small popup form so that visitors can send the link to their friends.
Creating the Code
It's easy to create the code needed for the linking script. After creating an online account, you decide whether you want to make a sharing/bookmarking button or an RSS feed button. Next, you select the look of the button. (You can always use your own design, if you like. Just change the link in the final code.) Then, select where the button is going and, finally, give the link to the feed, if applicable.
Once that's done, click the "Get Your Button Code" button. The code itself is simple. Below is a sample of the basic code for a sharing/bookmarking button:
You can paste that on a page or, better yet, call it with an include statement. If you're using PHP, you can paste the code into a file called "social.inc," and then include it like this (be sure to use the correct path):
Using server side includes, it would be done this way (once again, make sure you use the correct path):
Customization and Tracking Features
You can also add some customization to make the social bookmark work better with your site. You can do things such as adding branding, your logo, change colors, and select which social sites you want included in the dropdown menu. You can even change the language — support is available for Chinese, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and Swedish.
You also receive Web-based tracking of certain variables, e.g., usage trends, most popular links and the top social sites used. You can also track what continents your visitors come from. (These stats are taken from only those visitors that use the social bookmarking script.)
Conclusion
Overall, AddThis is a great service for helping to increase the traffic to your Web site. You don't need to worry about keeping up-to-date with all the new social bookmark sites or have to concern yourself with changing any code. It's easy to implement and can be a tremendous benefit to your Web site. Further information can be found on the site's help page.
Original: January 6, 2009
