AddThis Review
AddThis is yet another Social Bookmarking plugin for WordPress available online. What’s best about this is that it’s for FREE. With this, you’d be able to promote your content by sharing to the most popular social networking and bookmarking sites like Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, etc.
You can easily track what your visitors are doing when and how they share your site. Moreover, you can also compare different countries to see what each country is using the most. With this plugin, you’ll be given a library of custom icons made by 3rd party designers.
Be sure to check the terms of use before you use them on your site just to be sure you won’t experience problems. You can also customize share buttons, and allows you to monitor how your site is doing and how much you have shared via its analytics for social media sites, and that of course needs manual intervention, and you have to specify a time period. In the stat analysis you’ll see popular posts, popular services that people share to, as well as audience profile, top keywords and countries.
Usability
Using the Addthis plugin is easy and so far I am impressed with the results on my other sites. If you want to know where and how often your content is shared, this is the tool to use as it provides comprehensive statistics. However, unlike other social bookmarking/sharing plugins, it doesn’t allow you to display any number of the available services, as it only displays 4. I guess (have not tried it), you have to modify its code to make it display more services.
Features
- Makes sharing easy
- Get more traffic with the most popular social networking sites
- Easy to use and install
- It’s for FREE
Screenshots
Video
Conclusion
There’s no better way to put sharing button to your website using AddThis plugin. It’s free, easy to use, install, and implement. What more can you ask for? However, some are saying that its web-site style plugin is much better as it is easy to customize, and even people with a very limited knowledge of HTML, can use it. This wordpress style is almost non-customizable. At first, I had a problem adding Google Plus One button with my Joomla plugin. But thanks to the Addthis forum for providing a solution, and all you have to do is add it to the Toolbox Services field as ‘google_plusone’.
Right now this is my favourite plugin for adding sharing buttons.
There’s quite a few customization options here, but I find myself wanting options that aren’t available, but there are enough to keep you going.
There’s a lot of features and it’s very usable, you can choose where you want the social buttons which is nice to see, the usual above post, below post, above pages below pages … on the downside there’s no floating option which would have been nice, but it’s not too much of a big deal.
The best part here is the analytics because they give you all the data you need and also track address bar sharing which I haven’t seen in another sharing plugin.
I can’t comment support though because I’ve never needed it, it’s just worked without problems.
An excellent plugin that I currently use on a number of my blogs. I definitely recommend it, and with Google currently updating their search engine to include social media signals in their search engine rankings, I can’t see why anyone would choose to go without.
It’s a good product from a user experience prospective, though it does add additional code which ultimately slows the load of my website down, so says Google speed test, which was a major issue for me. otherwise, it’s great.
I love this plugin, I think the incorporation of social media into your website is very important, as you want to build an audience using as many methods as possible. Restricting yourself solely to the search engines is not the best option, besides creating awareness also increases the amount of links you get to your website.