AddThis as the First Step to a Website’s “Socialization”

The so-called Web 2.0 with its User-Generated Content (UGC) and mass distribution of the Internet all over the world and “inside” people's heads in general have been leading to incredibly fast growing of the information content on the Internet. And in respect that this information is hosted on different Internet resources, the role and value of links between information, i. e. information interconnection, are still great.

The so-called social networks nowadays are one of the most important “segments” of the Internet. They can considerably define the popularity of an Internet resource by theirs links to it. It seems quite usual, the links exchange invented long ago (used in SEO promotion as well). However, here the convenience of adding links for users of a particular social network plays the major role. Almost every social network has its own API, icons, etc. for adding links into it (into its user’s profile, page, forum, etc.).

Every website that wants to become “more social”, i. e. closer to social networks and users of the Internet in general, can and even must use these means to publish buttons like “Add the link to…” on its pages. The problem is, there are a lot of social networks, tens of them, hundreds and even thousands, and it is a bad style to overload your website with the appropriate number of icons, banners and buttons. Moreover, there is an important question of working hours to implement all this…

Then comes the help from AddThis – a web component, or rather a sharing platform. Its main advantage is the one, united and compact user interface for adding links to the current page into 300+ (!) services, websites, social networks, etc. (you do not need anymore to learn icons/API/etc. of each of them separately), in 50+ languages (including Russian – I took part in the translation 😊). And it looks trustworthy as “The #1 Bookmarking & Sharing Service” practically: it is used by 1.5 million domains and 1 billion unique users!

To add AddThis (sounds funny 😊) to your website you need to complete a few simple steps:

1. Select where you want to put your AddThis button: on a some website, on a WordPress website, on Blogger, MySpace, etc.
2. Select the style of the AddThis block: from to – there are a lot of options though it took some time for me to “write” my own option.
3. Define whether you need sharing (usage of AddThis) analytics for your website (to view the analytics you need to register), including clickback analytics.
4. Get the generated HTML/JavaScript code to add to your website.
5. If necessary, fix/improve the code and then publish it in your website template (on all its pages).

Voilà! Everything is ready with minimal work done (tested on my own website)! 😊

By the way, besides adding links to social networks and on similar websites AddThis provides tools, e. g. for e-mailing links, adding them to “Favorites” and even for printing pages. 😊