Top 3 Social Sharing Widgets and Why You Should Use Them

Want to increase site traffic and page views? Try adding Social Sharing and Bookmarking Widgets to your website. These widgets let visitors share your content with their friends through email, recommend it on Facebook, tweet it with Twitter, bookmark it on Del.icio.us and much more. It's a fast and easy way to tap into the ever growing Social Media Network and use it to your advantage. Why use Social Sharing and Bookmarking Widgets? * Increase traffic to your your site – When users share or bookmark your content, they are sharing a link back to your site which can draw more site visitors. * Engage your audience – Social sharing and bookmarking widgets provide additional ways for visitors to interact with your site and use your content to interact with each other. * Promote your site’s content - Social sharing and bookmarking extends your reach and exposes your site to new audiences and potential visitors. * Create backlinks - When your widget is posted on someone elses site or blog, it’s creating a healthy backlink to your site, which is beneficial to SEO. * Increase time on site - The best thing about using Social Sharing and Bookmarking Widgets, is that visitors can do all this sharing and bookmarking without ever leaving your site. How do you do it? It’s easy. There’s no need to design and slice images and create your own links. Luckily, a few services out there have done the heavy lifting for you. It's as simple as selecting the style button you want and then copying/pasting the code snippet into your pages between the tags. If your website uses templates, you can also copy the code into your template, so the toolbox will appear on all your pages automatically. Here are a few free and ready-made Sharing and Bookmarking Widgets: Add to Any Add to Any is great because it is quick, simple, and you don't have to register for it - just customize and download your widget. While it doesn't offer analytics like others, it supports email and has huge list of social bookmarking and social sharing sites. Customizing is as simple as clicking on the service you want to support and adding it to your button. Share This Share This has several button designs to choose from, including chicklets and counters. Like the other popular sharing widgets, it adapts to your users’ sharing habits. For example, if someone shares frequently on Facebook, the Facebook link will appear at the top. It comes with 20 web services by default, but it supports more than 39 of the best web sharing and bookmarking services. Real-time trending and analytics make this a more robust option than Add to Any, but you are required to register with the site to get the widget. Add This Add This loads very fast and is lightest of all of the widgets. The newest version of its sharing menu is optimized for the Apple iPad, the iPhone and Google Android. It comes with 10 web services and email link by default, but supports the largest collection of web sharing and bookmarking services. It also provides reporting and analytics, which will tell you the top shared content and how it's being shared. If you want to opt out of analytics, you can still get the widget without registering for the site. We here at LevelTen recommend using AddThis, but don’t just take our word for it. Add This is installed on 1.5 million domains and reaches 1 billion users per month, including sites like FBI.com and Whitehouse.gov.