Social Bookmarking Widgets: AddThis vs ShareThis.

Posted byVlad Zablotskyy 44 Comments on Social Bookmarking Widgets: AddThis vs ShareThis.

Over the period of last few years bloggers had found creative ways to allow their readers to easy share the content of the blog on social bookmarking websites. WordPress has several plugins allowing you to implement easy sharing of your content. Probably the most known plugin is Sociable– a plugin I often used on many of my WordPress powered websites. One of the things that I always wanted to see in Sociable plugin was the ability to report how many times and on which websites my content was shared. If they consider developing such reporting, I may use the Sociable plugin again. However for now I had to say goodbye to Sociable and for the past few weeks I was taking a closer look at AddThis and ShareThis.

AddThis

AddThis LogoI came across AddThis before I discovered ShareThis. AddThis allows you to add a button to your website by inserting a piece of code into your website or, if you are using WordPress, you can try their plugin. One o the downsides of using the plugin is that it inserts the button below the post and is not offering flexibility to place the button anywhere you want.

Issues With AddThis “Dropdown” Button




One thing that I find annoying about “dropdown” version of the AddThis button is that behaves “unexpectedly” (example on the left). I belong to the “mindset” that if you just hover over the button with the cursor it should not talk, sing, smile, wink or otherwise interact with me. Unless, of course, I click on it!

AddThis Reporting And Related Issues

One of the things you may quickly discover that in order not to mess up your AddThis statistics. You may need to open several accounts if you would like to separate the statistics for each website.

I would love AddThis develop and offer more in depth reporting. In particular I would like to see them reporting not only how many times a particular URL was shared, but to tell me exactly on which of the social websites it was shared.

ShareThis

ShareThis LogoAs you can see I have chosen ShareThis for this blog. Although I have not made the final decisions which services I will end up using, there are few things I like more about ShareThis. (UPDATE: After trying both AddThis and ShareThis I have opted to use AddThis on most of my blogs)

ShareThis Allows You To Track Multiple Domains

In your ShareThis account you can ad more than one URL. ShareThis provides separate statistics for each domain. It takes abotu 24 hours for your statistics to be shown from the time you add a domain and install the code or the WordPress plugin on your blog.

ShowThis Has More Detailed Statistics

While still short of reporting exactly which URL was submitted to what social networking websites, ShareThis offers some extra statistics that I find interesting and useful.

ShareThis Button Can Be Placed Anywhere

If you decide to use ShareThis on your wordpress, it is quite flexible as to where you can place the button on your blog. By default it places the button at the end of the article, but you can override that option or place an additional button in the beginning of your posts.

ShareThis Offers More “Sharing Options”

ShareThis Offers More OptionsBesides offering your readers to share your blog’s content on top social bookmarking websites, SharThis offers other blogger to “reblog” your content. It also offers and opportunity to your visitors to share your blog’s content via e-mail, SMS or Instant Messaging.

Conclusion

I think both services can improve reporting. While certain submissions (such as when your pages are submitted to StumbleUpon or Digg) can be noticed rather easily, allowing you to interact with the submitter. Improving this side of the reporting will allow yet another way for the owner of the blog to network with his or her readers.

Final thought for the blog owners. If you have not tried either of the services, make sure to try at least one of them. The implementation is very easy, both have WordPress plugin. It will take you less than 15 minutes to implement the plugins, but you can rep the benefits for years to come. One thing you have to remember that no plugin in the world can substitute your interaction with your readers and your fans.

44 replies on “Social Bookmarking Widgets: AddThis vs ShareThis.”

  1. Hello again Vlad, I just wanted to check in and see how things were going. We’ve just made some huge enhancements recently. Our menu is optimized for every user—every menu optimizes for each individual user. We also have over 170 service, thanks to all the open service directory. We’ve opened up our directory for any service, utility, or social bookmarks to join.

    I know you’ve blogged us on several occasions, and I wanted to get your opinion on any changes you’d like to see. Let me know if you have any ideas or thoughts. You can email me, or express ideas on our forum (http://www.addthis.com/forum)

    Thanks!

  4. Interestingly you write near the beginning that you have chosen “Share This” yet clearly the tool at the top of this post is by “Add This.”

    What gives?
    Mike

  5. @Mike,

    I sure need to update the post. I initially used the “Share This” widget but then switched to “Add This”. I believe at the time I made final decission Share This did not offer support for secure pages, which I needed for a client of mine.

    Thanks for the heads up, I will update the post.

  6. I agree with Vlad. After spending several hours implementing and customizing ShareThis, I realized they don’t support SSL? Very bizarre. There is no excuse not to offer the scripts with ssl support.

    AddThis however does, so this is what I am now using and I am very happy with it so far.

    ShareThis really missed the boat on this one.

  7. Nate,

    Thanks for stopping by and clarifying…. I was not sure if ShareThis ever added SSL support… This explains why AddThis is more visible on tons of online stores.

  8. I use AddThis on my site, and the part which I don’t like about it, is the flash tracking cookie it builds in. Sometimes it creates a 15px white border at the top, and it looks bad (I have a black background in my title).

    While the stats are great, i think I might opt for my own set of buttons. They are “just links” in the end, and the top ones are twitter, fb, digg and google.

    1. Michael,
      Thanks for stopping by. If you can manage to do your own bookmarks like this you probably better off. Any time you implement a javascript code of a third party you are at the mercy of their servers. For me AddThis is working well, so far I have never seen any downtimes on their side.

  10. And today addthis.com has several servers down and doesn’t work at all! 8-(

    I’d had no problem in a long time, but that one slows down all the websites because it tries to load the image and the drop down (which personally I like, but I understand your problem with it as it can actually cover up something else and that’s a problem…)

    Anyway, I hope it comes back soon!

  12. I was using AddThis or code from them, not there plugin, then I got Jetpack with its ShareDaddy support, now I downloaded the WordPress AddThis 2.0 plugin, but honestly I just liked putting in the code where I wanted it in my theme… Of course I’ll probably lose out on stats, but I think I’ve OD’d on stats anyway.

  13. would the sharethis be a better option now as lately they have the stream feature which will bring a lot of traffic to your site which is what some webmaster say but i dont have any proof so would be great for some feedback on this.

  14. ShareThis is way more feature rich and reliable. And their analytics tools are extremely informative.

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