One of the most powerful means to extending your brand is through social media. There are numerous accounts of things going viral after one person shares a link on Twitter or Facebook and within hours several hundred people if not thousands know about it.
While your company’s site may not be the type of content that spreads like wildfire, it is critical that you offer some type of sharing on your site. The usual approach is for people to go with the Big 2: Facebook and Twitter. This usually involves your web developer going out to each of those sites to get javascript that is installed on your pages.
This method works well; but makes it hard to keep up with all the new sites gaining traction every month - should I allow sharing on FB and Twitter only, or add in Stumbleupon? ShareThis solves this problem.
ShareThis allows you to pick and choose a multitude of options for sharing your content on a variety of social networks including Facebook, Twitter, Digg, LinkedIn, Reddit and more. They even allow a person on your site to share the content via email. Instead of keeping up with all the latest code snippets and networks, these guys take care of that for you.
In less than 5 minutes, and with one line of code, I had buttons for my favorite social network sites on my homepage. Now anyone visiting can quickly share my content and become an instant evangelist. The options that ShareThis provides and the ease at which a novice web developer can implement their code is truly impressive. And for now, it’s FREE.
