These days if you don’t have any sharing services on your web site, you’re really missing out on possible traffic opportunities. Social media has become a huge buzz term in the world of web but there’s a reason for that. Facebook, Twitter, StumbleUpon, etc. are all extremely popular sites where people are sharing links with friends and if you can tap into that market with the addition of a short snippet of code on your web site then why wouldn’t you? There are many different sharing services out there that allow you to add sharing features to your site very quickly. As of this post, I’m currently using a service by AddThis.com. With only a couple of lines of a code I am able to add sharing buttons for many popular sites:
So how do I do this? Well step one is to sign up for the service. That way you can also get tracking information from their site to see how well the sharing features are working. Next you would add this JavaScript to your page:
Then where ever you want the buttons to appear, you would put in this HTML:
<a href="http://www.addthis.com/bookmark/php?v=250&username=YOURUSERNAME" class="addthis_button_compact">Share</a>
<span class="addthis_separator">|</span>
<a class="addthis_button_preferred_1"></a>
<a class="addthis_button_preferred_2"></a>
<a class="addthis_button_preferred_3"></a>
<a class="addthis_button_preferred_4"></a>
</div>
And that’s it! You should have the buttons automatically appear and the javascript should also automatically hook up any events it needs to to make the sharing service work. Additionally, AddThis has a whole API that you can tap into and do custom buttons or functionality if you’re so inclined. There are also additional standard styles for specific sharing services. For instance, say I only wanted to get the Facebook “Like” button I could add code like below:
And that should give me this:
See how simple that is? If you haven’t started using a sharing service, I suggest you do. You should find as your site gets more popular, you’ll want to make the job of sharing content between your user base much easier and with these services, anyone can do it.