Web Worker Daily

Which do you prefer as a tool to let your visitors share your content with others: AddThis or ShareThis? What were the criteria you used to come to your decision on which one to use? Here are a few things you should consider when deciding which content-sharing app to use:

1. Ease of integration — Is it easy enough for you to embed the widget code into your web site or blog so you can offer sharing functionality to your readers?
2. Ease of use/performance – Is it easy and fast for your readers to share your content with others via multiple options such as email, their favorite social networks and microblogs?
3. Analytics — Does it offer you robust insight into the sharing activity on your site or blog?

Having been a longtime user, I can tell you that my initial response to the above questions about the ShareThis service would be “yes” on No. 1 and No. 2, and “sort of” on No. 3. But then I learned about the changes to the AddThis service, and I think that it may win me over as a customer. Here’s why. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been using ShareThis on my blogs and recommending it to my clients for a while now. I explain to my clients that ShareThis is a “passive broadcaster” of their content, giving their blog and web site visitors handy tools to email posts or articles to others, to easily blog about the content they are reading or to link to the content via any of over 30 social media and networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace, StumbleUpon, Mixx and del.icio.us.

For a while now, ShareThis had only one direct competitor – AddThis.

When I first went to sign up for one of these services, it seemed pretty much six of one and half a dozen of the other when comparing the two. I went with ShareThis because I liked their button, not a very strategic decision-making process, but when two services are quite comparable, it really boils down to going with either other people’s recommendations or with your gut.

There’s a new kid in town, however, giving both ShareThis and AddThis a run for their money.

A vision of Grouptivity, according to the company’s founder Ankesh Kumar, is to make sharing web content more powerful than ever. Kumar says that while sharing via bookmarking sites and social networks is important, his company has found that so far 80% of site visitors still opt to share content via email. So Grouptivity facilitates emailing content – integrating with users’ email account address books – rather than trying to change their more common behavior. ShareThis offers similar email integration while AddThis focuses more on the publisher.

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I’ve been working with clients to set up social media “satellite sites” as I call them to extend their brand and take advantage of the exponential power of social networking for reaching out to consumers. The question I hear time and time again is “How in the world can I manage all these social networks if I can’t even get to the rest of my work?”

I know we are all crunched for time. Sometimes, I don’t even know how I keep up with all of my writing and blogging, client projects and social networking sites. But I have found some cool “social aggregation broadcasting tools” that are making at least some of my tasks easier to handle.

What is a Social Aggregation Broadcasting Tool?

Okay, I have to admit, I just made that term up but I think it covers what I’m trying to convey. There are tools out there that help you aggregate your social networking sites for the purpose of broadcasting a message to more places with fewer steps hence Social Aggregation Broadcasting Tools (SABT? lol!).
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