'Net Features : addthis

Increase Sharing with AddThis Updates

Allison Howen — Thu, 13 Sep 2012 19:11:00 GMT

One of the 'Net's most popular sharing platforms, AddThis, has announced enhancements to its sharing tools. And in testing, these updates have proven to increase sharing by 11 percent.

The platform's change in layout and new improvements aim to enhance the social sharing experience for users and to provide publishers with improved capabilities for driving visitor engagement.

“Sharing, like search, is one of the key indicators of consumer intent on the internet,” said Ramsey McGrory, CEO of AddThis. “The breadth and depth of our presence on the web gives us a unique perspective into the social habits and preferences of consumers. We apply these insights to create more effective and efficient social solutions for publishers and brands, essentially making social engagement easier for users.”

The new functionalities of the AddThis platform include:

• Instant sharing – This allows visitors to share a publisher’s content without leaving the page, which increases the likelihood that the user stays on the site and continues reading.

• Social Sign In – Site readers can now sign-in to a website using their existing social credentials from Google, Facebook or Twitter. This provides a more personalized experience and eliminates the problem of having to create and remember unique registrations at each site a consumer visits. Additionally, social sign in provides publishers with detailed information from the consumer’s social profile, which helps site owners create more personalized content.

• One Code – Whether a reader is viewing a page from a tablet, mobile phone or desktop, AddThis provides publishers with one code that works on every device.

• More personalized sharing – AddThis supports more than 70 languages and 300 services, and the newest sharing tools are optimized to show the right services to the right users at the right time. For example, if a reader is more likely to share on Twitter than Facebook, AddThis will position Twitter higher in the sharing menu.

AddThis Adds Social Sign In

Allison Howen — Wed, 22 Aug 2012 17:04:00 GMT

AddThis is the latest company to join in the fight against Password Fatigue.

The social sharing platform has announced the integration of Social Sign In to its suite of social plug-ins, which enables users to log in to a website using their existing social profiles from three of the Web's largest social networks - Google, Facebook and Twitter.

The new feature offers site owners the option to host the technology on their own sites, giving them access to customer information and databases. This means that Social Sign In is not only valuable for consumers, who can easily login to a new website without creating a new user profile, but it also allows publishers to take advantage of the data that is connected to consumers' social identities. Additional benefits of offering social login include improved consumer engagement metrics and increased time spent on-site.

“Consumers increasingly want personalized content experiences but resist the inefficiencies and hassle of unique registrations at each site they visit. Social Sign In gives consumers a more interactive connection to the site while providing publishers with accurate authentication and demographic data,” says Charlie Reverte, Head of Publisher Products at AddThis. “Our goal is to use social infrastructure to strengthen the consumer-publisher connection by speeding up registration and sign-in with a secure, privacy-assured process.”

AddThis says the new feature will be available on more than 14 million domains, and will support 1.3 billion-plus users monthly.

AddThis Improves Pinterest Sharing

Allison Howen — Mon, 02 Jul 2012 00:30:00 GMT

Popular social sharing platform AddThis has launched a new way for publishers to integrate Pinterest sharing into their site, and early tests show that this new tool has increased sharing to Pinterest by 20 percent.

AddThis’ new Pinterest sharing experience includes both additional user options and support for publishers. The new tool improves the experience for users by allowing them to select the right image, while publishers should be happy to know that this Pinterest button doesn’t required additional configuration – only one simple code snippet.

The button offers an enhanced image selection experience by helping visitors choose a suitable image to share. Additionally, publishers have the ability to choose a preferred image to suggest if desired.

“The AddThis platform saw the rise of Pinterest early, but many sites could not add the Pin It button because of the additional coding required,” says Ramsey McGrory, AddThis CEO. “Now, any site can get a Pinterest button with a simple code snippet and track the shares alongside the rest of their services on AddThis analytics.”

AddThis Offers Three New Social Plugins

Allison Howen — Thu, 10 May 2012 21:00:00 GMT

The company formerly known as Clearspring has launched a new set of social plugins to help publishers better engage with their audiences.

Clearspring recently changed its name to AddThis – after the company’s popular share tool that is used by 14 million websites and reaches more than 1.3 billion users each month. The company’s three new social plugins expand beyond sharing to help publishers and advertisers make their sites more personal and engaging, and they come with enhanced analytics that provide better insights on content-generating fans and followers.

Check out more information about the three new plugins below:

Follow Tool – Enables publishers to place follow buttons with content on sites, which allows users to become fans, followers or subscribers with one click.

Trending Content Tool – This tool uses a content feed API to continuously promote a brand's top content in real time on their website, in newsletters or on social channels.

Welcome Tool - Publishers can optimize a new user's experience with this tool, by welcoming them with a personalized greeting and call-to-action.

"The flow of big data for advertisers and publishers is only valuable if the data becomes actionable," says AddThis CEO Ramsey McGrory. "AddThis powers the social web and social advertising through sophisticated data-driven products that make site owners and brands smarter and more effective."

Social Sharing in 2011 via AddThis

Pete Prestipino — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 00:30:00 GMT

Who is the winner of the social sharing wars? Well, Facebook of course. That's what indicated in data released today by ClearSpring Technologies, makers of the popular AddThis sharing platform.

AddThis is really the perfect platform to help understand social sharing trends. The tool is currently used on 11 million domains and see 1.2 billion uniques a month. So who are the top sharing services?

Facebook makes up 52.1 percent of sharing on the Web, followed by Twitter at 13.5 percent. Both Twitter and Tumblr are growing however with 576 percent and nearly 1300 percent growth for the two social sites respectively.

Some other highlights from the study:

- Stumbleupon creates a "viral lift" of 320 percent
- Google +1 grew 373 percent by has platuead
- Sharing on Digg and MySpace declined by 47 percent and 56 percent respectively

Essential Social Sharing Tools for Websites

Mike Phillips — Thu, 10 Feb 2011 20:30:00 GMT

Social media has become a standard in Web business and that includes design and development. In the past, providing eye-catching and functional social profile links and sharing options was a cumbersome process; involving hard-coding and scouring the Web for usable images.

Not anymore. Amateur bloggers (and sophisticated ones, too) can deploy any number of widgets with one click. Many of the social widgets also offer developers the ability to modify and implement the tools and offer APIs.

Enabling social sharing and providing links to various social touch points is not optional - today's online business environment demands it. Fortunately there are tools to make it easy. Below are just a few.*

AddThis is one of the most recognizable and popular social widgets available. According to the website, AddThis is featured on more than 7 million domains. The advantage of that, is that users have been exposed to the widget repeatedly, meaning most are likely quite familiar, and therefore adept, at using it. AddThis also offers some pretty insightful analytics (which can be emailed to you), including search and referrers, social mentions and audience interests. There are plenty of display options with AddThis, so look around the site. ShareThis is similar.

Share and Follow (pictured, at left) is a hot item in the blogging world. Call it a social sticky widget or floating sidebar widget, it allows users one-click access to your social profiles and sits in a fixed position; so that even when a user scrolls down or up, the widget stays on the side of the page - allowing for users to share whenever it strikes their fancy. Although constantly present, it's attractive and relatively small, so it does not feel intrusive. It also enables users to share content. Add in Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Yelp ... just about anything. The WordPress plugin supports WP e-Commerce, so product pages can be shared and 'liked.' There are several choices when it comes to "follow me" widgets but this one is one of the most popular, and one of the best. Social Slider is similar.

Sexy Bookmarks (pictured, at right) is another sharing tool but, unlike AddThis, it comes in a slick package. You might even call it "sexy." Just about every necessary social network is supported, and RSS. It's whimsical design and hover-over effects are a good option for bloggers with a bit of lighter atmosphere, perhaps not so great for business publishers. Sexy Bookmarks is very easy to install for WordPress, Blogger and Joomla.

*Many plugins can be unstable, or you might need support. Be sure to read user reviews about these tools before using them, and look for an active community.

AddThis into the Advertising Game

Administrator — Sun, 08 Aug 2010 14:00:00 GMT

Clearspring Technologies, makers of the wildly popular AddThis content sharing platform, has launched Audience Platform which enables advertisers and publishers to reach audiences of influencers and “intenders”. I am not familiar with the term intender – if you are please do comment below and let us know. We could draw some assumptions but why not ask our wicked smart readers?

Clearspring's AddThis platform is currently used by over 1.5MM unique domains to share content including webpages, widgets, photos, and video to over 300 social services such as Facebook, Twitter, and Digg. With the Audience Platform, Clearspring is aiming to leverage its real-time data processing engine to “aggregate and synthesize influence and intent data” from across the platform. Not to put too fine a point on the announcement – but thanks to AddThis, ClearSpring is making its way into the online advertising and publishing game.

"Our focus has been to connect people via content by powering social sharing across the web. Our sharing platform, AddThis, today reaches over 1 billion people online and drives more sharing than any other publisher platform of its kind," said Hooman Radfar, Chief Executive Officer of Clearspring. "Our Audience Platform technology leverages our huge reach and proprietary analytics engine to provide advertisers and publishers with incredibly valuable audiences, as well as provides consumers with advertisements that are of interest, without leveraging personally identifiable information."