ShareThis - social bookmarking to promote your blog

I haven't really being saying much about social bookmarking here at Business Blog Angel, have I?

It's the classic small biz 'issue' of spending so much time working 'in' your business that you can't find the time to work 'on' your business, and rightly or wrongly, maintaining this blog always takes second place to client work.  BUT, if you are a business blogger and you are not yet using the wealth of free social media tools to promote your content, then you are missing out on a lot of the power of blogging for business. I'm talking now about social bookmarking, social networking, blog directories & communities and micro-blogging.

Given that there is so much I want to share with you, but so little time to devote to writing a series on the subject, I'm thinking that a webinar or teleclass series might be the way to go, but in the meantime...

I've recently started including the ShareThis widget on clients' blogs as part of our Enhanced package - either as a Feedflare courtesy of Feedburner (so it appears above the "Posted by..." line on the blog as well as in the feed), or as a 'widget' (so, in Typepad, it appears after the "Posted by...." line).

Previously, I used to select a few individual Feedflares eg. Stumbleupon, Digg, Email This etc. but if you want to give your readers the widest choice then things very quickly start to look cluttered and confusing.  ShareThis allows you to provide 30+ social media links from just the one link so you can see why I've changed tack on this one.  Having said that, another social bookmarking site and alternative to ShareThis is SocialMarker which provides over 120 sites to submit to, so even better perhaps... I've not used SocialMarker yet, but first glance suggests that unlike ShareThis, they do not provide an option to post to Twitter nor to email it to a friend.

Now whilst Twitterers may be a small group amongst the web-using masses, pretty much everyone uses email right? So surely, including an 'Email this to a friend' option has to be a priority doesn't it? I was pondering that question just yesterday and lo and behold, into my Inbox this morning drops a very interesting email from ShareThis. Here's an extract:

"Knowing the sharing activity on your site can give you some insight as to what your most popular content is and how your visitors are sharing. We feel that it's important to listen to your visitors, and they have a lot to say. We wanted to share with you some information involving overall sharing activity around the net."

Sharing Activity

"As you can see, Email dominates sharing activity. So, make sure your ShareThis widget has the Send/Email tab to help get your content out to as many eyes as possible. You can reconfigure your ShareThis widget at any time by logging into ShareThis and going to the Get the Buttton page and choosing your installation method."

Interesting huh? I'm going to ask ShareThis how Twitter fairs in this analysis, but in the meantime, I guess the message here is, if you are using Social Marker, you'd do well to add an additional 2 options for Twitter and Email. Or perhaps you know different... click on the 'Comments' link below and leave yours - we're all ears...

Comments

[Claire]

Quick update for you...

Had a lovely response back from ShareThis, and in a nutshell, Twitter is included in the Other portion of the pie chart but there's currently no way of knowing the exact % breakdown.

I've also since learnt that there is no 'Feedflare' nor 'Typepad widget' option with SocialMarker so at present, Typepad users would have to manually insert the button code into each post.

Me? I'm sticking with ShareThis!