Social Bookmarking Plugins: Why I Chose AddThis Over ShareThis

I’ve always been a ShareThis user but after thinking about it and comparing it to AddThis, I’ve finally made the change by dumping ShareThis and jump onto AddThis. Here are just the few considerations why I made this change.

1) Loading Size
ShareThis is bulky compared to AddThis. Don’t believe me? Try having both ShareThis and AddThis on your blog, use Firebug, and goto the Net tab (it measures what get sends and retrieved) and you’ll see that there are more calls to sharethis.com when compared to addthis.com. There are more things to be downloaded/retrieved from ShareThis and I dislike the wait (not long, but still…).

2) How Will User Bookmark and Share My Post/Page?
The AddThis dropdown widget is way more interactive then ShareThis. The flow of getting an intereseted person to bookmark/share your site is:
1) Click on a the “Share This” link
2) Wait for services to be populated.
3) Choose a service to save your bookmarks to

While compared to AddThis:
1) Hover over a image and you’ll get a drop down of the services instantly
3) Choose a service to save your bookmarks to

That’s a 33% reduction in terms of steps needed to get a person to bookmark/share your site! You want things to be easy as it can be, and this is it.

3) Ease of Implementation
It’s so simple to get the bookmark/share widget from AddThis onto your blog. Although there’s a plugin to add AddThis automatically at the end of each post, it’s equally easy to do so by hand. The widget customization page shows you more but the basic can already get you started.

<!-- ADDTHIS BUTTON BEGIN -->
<script type="text/javascript">
addthis_pub = 'YOUR-ACCOUNT-ID';
</script><a href="http://www.addthis.com/bookmark.php" onMouseOver="return addthis_open(this, '', '&#91;URL&#93;', '&#91;TITLE&#93;')" onMouseOut="addthis_close()" onClick="return addthis_sendto()"><img src="http://s7.addthis.com/button1-bm.gif" width="125" height="16" border="0" alt="" /></a><script type="text/javascript" src="http://s7.addthis.com/js/152/addthis_widget.js"></script>
<!-- ADDTHIS BUTTON END -->

If you want stats and reporting of how much your post/page are shared, you will need to register and then replace addthis_pub with your account-id. Or else, it can simply be left blank.

That’s it, hopefully by doing this you can get more people to share your work 🙂

Goodbye ShareThis. I still remember writing a post about some SEO considerations with Share This, but don’t think I will need to worry with that again anymore