Social Button Stats
Over on Twittch, I use the AddThis service. They provide analytics showing which pages were shared, and to where:
That’s just the chart — they provide actual numbers, as well.
The Problem
I dislike the fact that the AddThis buttons are so tiny, and they are all lumped together in a single dropdown. People have to click once to show the available buttons, and a second time to share the link.
I plan to replace AddThis with a row of larger buttons, and will focus on the most critical sites: DZone (not supported by AddThis), FaceBook, Digg, and Twitter.
My theory is that more people will click and share my comics if the buttons are more prominent. But I’ll lose the analytics, so I won’t really have a way to directly measure success.
Is there a way I can use large, custom icons, while retaining click counts for each icon?
Write a custom redirector like I’m sure AddThis uses.
Hey, my name is Justin Thorp. I’m the Community Manager for AddThis. I really appreciate your feedback. We actually created a product to solve this exact use case. It’s called AddThis Toolbox – http://addthis.com/help/toolbox
With it, you can easily create your own custom AddThis interface which gives your users one click access to share to the services they want.
Would love to hear your thoughts on it.
In terms of DZone, we’re going to be supporting it with the next big release of the AddThis menu. We have all kinds of great stuff planned for this release and are excited to get it out to the world. We appreciate your patience while we work on this.
If you have any questions, thoughts, or concerns, don’t hesitate to drop me a line.
Yeah I’ve asked the SAME thing and I like the toolbox, but I’d love to have the icons a little bigger. For example, Sexy bookmarks is _exactly_ what I need (plus it’s fun to play with the icons) but I don’t use wordpress.
Example (scroll down):
http://sexybookmarks.net/daily-dose-of-crazy/twitter-the-mini-soap-opera
I’m going to download it anyway and dissect it, perhaps I can make it work?