AddThis - Social Media Integration for Your Website

Social media has become one of the primary ways webpages get traffic these days and allowing users to "spread the good word" about your site is equally important. AddThis.com is a free service that easilly implements social media links of your choosing into your website.

AddThis is a great free service. Simple to install and get running on your website. It may take a little playing around with the options and reading some of the documentation to get it exactly how you want but that goes with anything with this many features.

Creating Social Media Sharing Buttons

To get started it is a simple as creating an account. Then pasting the code into your website.

The default code will get you started but you will probably want to do some tweaking. To the left of the code box is a Customize link which allows you to pick which social media outlets to use and the size of the icons. If you are curious how I set up the social links on this site, here is the code:

<div class='addthis_toolbox'>
         <a class="addthis_button_facebook_like" fb:like:layout="button_count" fb:like:href="thelinkgoeshere"></a>
         <a class="addthis_button_tweet" tw:url="thelinkgoeshere"></a>
         <a class="addthis_button_google_plusone" g:plusone:size="medium" g:plusone:href="thelinkgoeshere'}"></a>
     </div> 

These are the links to individual page content. If you are using this on a blog for every entry the link will have to be dynamically created. If you are putting these on a static page just drop the URI in. Pretty simple, just the three social networks I wanted to use Twitter, Facebook and Google Plus and they link to a specific page. The javascript is up in the head of the document.

Reporting

Aside from obviously adding buttons to your site AddThis also has a pretty nice tracking feature built in. If you are familiar with using Google Analytics than the interface should be pretty familiar. Also, like Google Analytics you only have to create one account for all of your websites.

The three main categories reported on your Summary page are Shares, Clicks and Viral Lift. Shares are the number of times people shared your content. Clicks measures the traffic back you receive from those shares. Viral Lift is the percentage increase in traffic from your social media shares. So using this system you can easily see not only if social media is working for you but which social media platforms are bring in the most traffic and you can swap out social media links accordingly. Another nice feature is the ability to connect to your Twitter and Facebook accounts to view their statistics from inside AddThis.

The Audience Geography tabs in Addthis also holds some promice, giving information about your users.

My only complaint is the documentation could be better or at least supply some better examples showing the various ways your social buttons can be set up. It took me a little bit of searching to uncover how to set up buttons for specific pages and the site as a whole.

If you don’t currently have any social media integration on your website I recommend AddThis as a good place to get started.