

Ask HN: How effective are "share this" buttons? - jwb119

In your opinion do buttons that assist users in publishing your content to other sources (digg, facebook, etc.) really work?<p>My general feeling is that they are a waste of space, but I'm wondering if anyone has any helpful experience/data to share..
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patio11
In a non-technical niche, for the last 100,000 times I've displayed them,
they've been clicked on 4 times and resulted in 1 save.

On the other hand, for the right sort of material (authoritative "you'll want
to read this later" reference aimed at geeks), Delicious buttons perform VERY
well for me.

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gourneau
As I user I do use these buttons, when I am not on my personal machines.

If I am on one of my own machines, I use the wonderful Firefox plugin
Shareaholic <http://www.shareaholic.com/> to easily share links.

As a developer would I use these buttons? Yes.

Why use these buttons when it is possible for users to manually share links
using X service?

Because these buttons reduce the cognitive load of sharing that link. Making
it more likely that lazy users will share it.

From <http://tantek.com/log/2007/02.html#d19t1813> "More specifically, all
other things being equal, the cognitive load required to complete an action or
task in a human computer interface is directly (probably linearly)
proportional to the number of clicks and keystrokes required to complete that
action or task. Cognitive load can be roughly defined as "how mentally
easy/hard it feels to do something".

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arjunb
like another user mentioned, shareaholic looks pretty interesting. however, i
think browser plugins are too high friction for an average user to install.
has anyone implemented something similar as a bookmarklet?

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sam_in_nyc
I'm releasing a prototype in a few days. Sit tight.

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joshu
They don't do much. Nobody clicks them.

People who use those products already have bookmarklets or extensions or
toolbars or whtever already installed.

It's more of a subtle way for publishers to tell their audiences to share with
other people.

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sjs382
This is a complete guess and have no evidence to support it:

I don't believe the buttons offer ANY advantage because the people most likely
to use them are the same crowd of enthusiasts that already have the
bookmarklets in their "bookmark toolbar" that offer the exact same
functionality.

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mwinters58
My complete guess is pretty much the opposite :)

My friends have no idea what delicious is, nor other tagging/bookmarking
programs, but they love to find interesting/funny content on the web and share
that on facebook. I do the same, even though I have delicious and facebook
bookmarklets installed. Just lazy I guess

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sjs382
That's an interesting perspective I never considered. I guess I was
restricting my domain to 'enthusiast' applications like delicious, reddit,
digg, etc. Facebook, I agree, is one place where these links would benefit the
user.

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siong1987
I don't know how effective it is. But, do you all know that there is actually
a startup behind this "share this" button? <http://sharethis.com/>

And, they are doing quite well too -
<http://siteanalytics.compete.com/sharethis.com/?metric=uv>

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c3o
there's also addthis.com and addtoany.com

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aupajo
All this is speculation, we need data.

Someone needs to write a script for Share This which records every time
someone clicks on it and then compare those numbers to the amount of actual
traffic, to find out what percentage of visitors click that button.

Volunteers?

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WalterGR
I can't speak for Share This, but here's some actual data for AddThis from my
site, <http://onlineslangdictionary.com/> :

Past year: 1.5 million visits, 4.7 million pageviews, and 108 "saves" via
AddThis.

In the past month, 40% of saves were for Facebook, 40% for Google Bookmarks,
and 20% for browser bookmarks.

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andreyf
Absolute waste of space. I've never clicked on one, nor do I intend to. If I
really wanted one, I'd find or write a greasmonkey script, bookmarklet, or
what have you.

Disclaimer: Obviously, different users have different habits. These are mine.

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rksprst
I use them frequently when I want to share something. If I'm reading a
newspaper story that's interesting and I want to share it with my gf or
friends, I usually use the "email it" button. If it's something that I'm
really passionate about, then I might submit it to facebook, digg, etc...
Though mostly I mainly use the email it feature.

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canoebuilder
Like so many things, the answer to do they "really work?" will be quite
variable.

In the interest of optimizing screen space you might look into implementing
something like this.

<http://www.azarask.in/blog/post/socialhistoryjs/>

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leftnode
I can offer an alternative point of view in that they're clicked numerous
times for other applications. I write tracking software for one of our clients
who sends out hundreds of thousands/millions of emails to their 400,000 person
email list (all legit/opt in). The emails have links to short movies that they
can then click a Share Now/Send To A Friend button so their friend will get
the movie link too.

I don't have any numbers off the top of my head, but they have a pretty decent
click rate, way more than 10%. Most of these people are a non-technical
audience, so I think that has a lot to do with it too.

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tdavis
I'd tell you if we could log into addthis.com with the credentials their site
provided as our current username and password. Or if they replied to customer
emails. AKA if they weren't a shit pile.

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BinaryPie
We use them by demand from the customer. They are also VERY helpful for viral
growth. While most tech savvy users will probably not use the feature there
are many other demographics that will.

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oscardelben
We are using a "share this" button for a video based startup, and in my
experience it is not important how many people will click on that button, but
the potential traffic that those link could generate. So my conclusion is that
share this button is very effective for video advertising but less effective
for social bookmarking.

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Mystalic
My AddThis and ShareThis have been used over 1000 times.

One of them got me to the front page of digg.

That's enough evidence for me. It's about maximizing space. AddThis is the
best in that respect.

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stuntgoat
When looking at music listings, the button to add the event to my G __gle
calendar is kick-ass. I guess I could share my calendar with others too. I
just thought I would share that with you.

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sgupta
"Share this" buttons gently remind people to spread the word, even if they
don't use the actual button.

(referenced from Word of Mouth Marketing by Andy Sernovitz)

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pclark
interesting topic!

my project will be launching soon, and it'll be interesting to see which
implementation we should take:

a) share this buttons b) "email this" button c) no buttons

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klon
Our stats indicate a 0.3% click rate

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kwamenum86
Depends on your website's audience.

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mattmaroon
Did Ghandi use Share This buttons? Does it matter?

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aneesh
The proper spelling is Gandhi.

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mattmaroon
Good point. I actually knew that and got it right at first, then seem to have
picked up the wrong one from a comment subconsciously. Fascinating.

