I’ve been going through a period of revisiting previously used and discarded plugins and widgets.
Recently, I reintroduced IntenseDebate to psionmark.com and now I’m giving ShareThis another shot.
ShareThis provides a plugin for Wordpress, Blogger and TypePad users and a chunk of code for other sites. Once installed, you’ll see a little icon at the bottom of each post (or wherever you’ve decided to manually install it). You can have a rotating or static icon. I like the rotating one. A visitor to your site can then click on the icon and they’ll be shown a window (see screenshot above) from which they can share the post to a number of Social Networking sites, post it direct to their own blog, Twitter, FaceBook etc, or email it to their friends.
Like IntenseDebate, ShareThis has come on leaps and bounds since I last gave it a try. The Wordpress plugin works a treat. It allows you to show the top 20 Social Networking sites (which updates automatically), or you can select your own from a list of 36. I’ve left mine set to auto for now.
Another really nice feature is the reporting. You can see how many times the widget has been shown, how many people have clicked it, and to what sites people have shared posts. This is a must-have. Without knowing who’s doing what (if anything), you’ve got no idea if it’s effective or not.
Another keeper, at least for the time being.
