In Social Media

AddThis embraces Facebook Like, but is it overkill?

It appears that the unstoppable march to ubiquity continues for Facebook’s new Like social plugin, with news yesterday that the 1.2 million Web sites and blog that use the AddThis plugin can now integrate Like as well.

addthis.gif

Great news for AddThis users, though my personal take is the AddThis button – along with WordPress plugins like Sociable – that present a menu of dozens to hundreds of different share options are probably overkill.

Quick flashback, the year is 1995. I’m sitting in an early Web Marketing undergrad course that basically focused on the twin pillars of traffic generation: banner ads and directory listings (for those too young to remember, this was pre-Google, pre-SEO, pre-SEM, etc). Our class assignment for the day involves presenting a basic marketing plan for a fictional client. Student team after student team gets up and shares how they’ll spend huge chunks of time submitting their client’s site to dozens of both mainstream and niche site directories.

When I got up, I said why waste time and money, and instead just submit to the 3-4 directories that most people actually used. AddThis, and the proliferation of 20-50 icon share button lists, reminds me of just this.

Yes, you could present an option to “share” your page on fooxweb, Drimio, Mawindo, and Surfpeople. Or, you could simply present them with options for the sites that actually matter to significant numbers of users: Facebook, Twitter, Digg, MySpace, and StumbleUpon.

I’ll argue in a later post why even that pared down list is too long. But while I think it’s fantastic to have such as easy way, via AddThis, to drop sharing options onto your site, please do avoid the temptation to include every bookmark and social sharing service ever launched in the list, and focus instead on the ones that matter most to the people you use your site.

I’ll leave you with an example of the other extreme, just for consideration – ESPN. Simple, and I’m guessing they still get all the sharing they need.

Kentucky head coach John Calipari, AD Mitch Barnhart begin _initial discussions_ about restructuring contract - ESPN.gif

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  • http://drinkingoatmealstout.com Justin Thorp

    Hi Kevin, it's Justin. I'm the Community Manager for the AddThis sharing platform.

    Yep, we do support a lot of services. About a year ago, we started getting contacted a dozen times a day by folks that represent every type of niche online community and popular online social tool in every country in the world.

    We saw this as a pretty interesting possibility. Instead of just providing options for a US-centric lowest common denominator audience, we could make it possible for anyone to share anywhere online. We built a system that allowed us to do this. We now support over 270 services and with the next batch should pass well over 300.

    This includes sites like the German social network studiVZ or the Dutch social network Hyves. It also includes other types of tools for engaging with a website, like Instapaper, Aviary, or Google Translate. Each of the 270 are actively used on a daily basis.

    Yes, as you pointed out, this presents a practical problem. How do you show the right services to the right user at the right time? Well, this is something that we've been working on.

    First, we decided to tap into the network effect that we've been seeing with our own product. When you use AddThis on another site, it'll remember what services you used and personalize AddThis when you see it else where on other sites. Secondly, we also use a user's browser language as a vector of information to see if they'd be interested in an international service.

    More info – http://addthis.com/features#smartest

    So, for example, I use sharing Instapaper, GMail, and Yammer a lot. Yes, they're not top social networks but I find them useful, a long with others. So, I get them in my AddThis menu because I've shared to them before. Or, if I was I had a French browser, you probably really like the social network Viadeo because a lot of people in France do. We personalize accordingly. We're able to get the right service to the right users at the right time.

    Another fun stat, Facebook & Twitter only represent about 40% of all sharing that we see and we see a lot of sharing. We're on about 1.5 million websites. (More stats – http://addthis.com/services)

    In terms of the number of services displayed, we actually did research to see how many services we could display to maximize sharing. That's what we're displaying.

    Hopefully this is helpful in explaining where we're coming from. If you have any thoughts or questions, don't hesitate to drop me a line. – justin@clearspring.com

    PS – Tell Jim I said hi.

  • http://www.socialmallard.com/ Kevin Briody

    Hi Justin,
    Thanks for the very detailed reply, I learned a bunch about AddThis that I hadn't known before. My point isn't directly aimed at AddThis – as you note, it has some smart features, and there are a lot of sites out there who obviously love this particular approach. My point is that there's a tradeoff to be considered – to aim for simplicity (just using a few buttons to cover the most heavily used buttons) at the expense of variety, or focus on variety and user choice (the AddThis approach).

    The 40% stat is interesting, thank you very much for sharing. If I had to put money on a trend, I'd say that % will continue growing over time. Just like my example from the mid-90s, when a few major directories started to emerge from the chaos and dominate (before Google wiped the floor with them), I think we're entering a similar stage around social bookmarking and sharing where the majority of activity will start to coalesce around a few dominating services.

    Again, it all boils down to making that decision for a blog or site owner, and AddThis is certainly a valid and very popular choice for sharing as you noted. Thanks again for the comment!

  • http://drinkingoatmealstout.com Justin Thorp

    Hey Kevin, I guess I just don't think that giving your users choice and making a simple interface that promotes sharing are mutually exclusive. Based on the data we've collected from lots and lots of AB testing, you can actually get more sharing if you present more options to the user in a smart way.

  • http://www.socialmallard.com/ Kevin Briody

    Justin – Your comments helped me clarify my thinking some. It's less about the appearance of choice, or design aesthetics, and more about what's the optimum layout for share buttons that incents users to click? Do you know of any public AB test data – or any you'd be willing to share – comparing pages with just a few of the major share buttons (like how they use them on ESPN or Mashable) with plugins like AddThis? I love having to change my opinions based on really great data that we can all learn from.