Back in October of 2008, I wrote a post in which I tried to compare two services that allow your readers to share the content of your blog on variety of social bookmarking websites- AddThis and ShareThis. At the time I was experimenting with both widgets across my blogs. While AddThis may have been a little more recognizable, I thought that ShareThis offered better reporting.
Over the last few weeks, AddThis managed to win my heart and today I would like to highlight few of the changes.
Button and The Way User May Interact With it
While I am still not that thrilled about button on “hover” behaviour- I would rather it to begin interaction on “click”. But considering AddThis popularity, I think it is safe to assume that majority of visitors expect AddThis button to behave a certain way. Besides there is a reason why AddThis button responds to both “on hover” and “on click”. When you however over the button with your moths a small widow is pulled down with several essential social bookmarking websites:
However if a visitor clicks on the button, a larger window pops up which allows you to choose between about 47 different social bookmarking websites:
In the past when a visitor clicked the button, it would take him or her to a page on AddThis website.
Reporting and Statistics
Not sure it was me (highly unlikely) AddThis listened to, but they did heck of a job with improving the reporting and statistics. First thing you may notice logging into your account is that AddThis now segregates data for each domain. If you happened to have AddThis button on multiple websites, you are likely to find this feature useful.
AddThis now also provides data on where your content is submitted to. You can find that under “Top Services”.
In addition AddThis also provides information about geographical location of users sharing your content- look for it under “Top Continents”.
hey vlad, yeah i love both these services. as a designer however – i was reading on another blog comparing these services and found http://www.crowdsend.com which seems pretty sweet?
looks better in my opinion.
@Vlad, I’m the Community Manager at AddThis. Thanks for using our service and thanks for all of your feedback. We really appreciate it.
In terms of hover vs. on click, we found that the share rate went up 4x when the menu came up on hover vs. on click.
We’re here to get you the most shares possible so naturally we went with on hover.
Definitely, let me know if there is anything we can do to make it better – justin@addthis.com
@Thomas, what do you like about Crowdsend?
Hey,
This is an awesome blog you’ve
got here!! I’m definitely going to
bookmark it!
🙂