So, over and over again, I get involved in the debate of whether to use AddThis or ShareThis and honestly, what I always tell the other person, it depends on the week. The two are constantly in the chase of new features and both are wonderful (and really should be required for your blog) tools for sharing content out to social media. I would just consider them another piece to the content marketing puzzle.Here at Compendium, we are constantly looking for ways to optimize your blog on your behalf. One way we do this is by implementing both tools, AddThis and ShareThis, using an asynchronous JavaScript request. Some people may be wondering, "What in the world are you talking about right now?" So here is a brief explanation in simple, everyday terms...
Help Your Pages Load Faster
These tools typically make a request to their web servers every time they appear on the page. For example, if you are looking at a page and you see 20 posts listed, the default JavaScript will make 20 different requests. It's really not enough to be alarmed about, but if you start adding more and more to your pages, your load times will start to lag. Which means your readers' experience = not so great.
We've created some additional code (in JavaScript) that affects the standard code provided by ShareThis or AddThis. Our changes still add these tools to each post on a page, but make loading the code a lower priority than the content and images. The reader gets the content they want a little faster, and the sharing code finishes loading while they read. By the time the reader wants to share a particular post, the sharing service is ready to receive the post title, URL and description.
Hopefully, that all made sense and helped explain how we implement sharing tools on your blog.
Make Your Social Marketing Better
Yesterday, I added something new to the configuration for one of our clients, Cvent. I added the ability to tag or add your own Twitter handle when using AddThis. So, instead of a share looking like this:
"New blog post - Winning Event Strategies via @AddThis"
Each time one of your readers Tweets, it instead uses your Twitter handle, a la
"New blog post - Winning Event Strategies via @Cvent"
Ideally, this will help drive the followers of the reader who shared your post to your Twitter page. Brilliant, right? I've seen clients do this themselves in the past, but now our templates support this in a cleaner fashion. If you are a client and want to see this on your sharing tools, great, send an email to help@compendium.com and let the support team know -- BUT REMEMBER - you must be using AddThis. I hope to have something similar for ShareThis in the near future.
If you are not using sharing tools on your blog yet, YOU SHOULD BE!!!! Check out the AddThis or ShareThis Websites, sign up for an account, and send the information on the the Support Team. We will get it added to your blog for you.
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