Introducing the ShareThis Stream

March 2nd, 2010
 

Today is one of those exciting days that you don’t get to experience very often – the culmination of months worth of work, coming to a head. Everyone here at ShareThis has been anticipating this release for weeks, putting in extra hours in order to get ready for this moment: the launch of our newest product, the ShareThis Stream.

We’re extremely proud of our work on the ShareThis Stream and think it’s going to be a valuable product for our users. At its simplest, the ShareThis Stream is a great tool for cutting through the noise of the Web using the most valuable filter you have – your friends. At its deepest, the ShareThis Stream represents a wider switch that’s happening right now, as sharing becomes more than just a simple utility and moves toward being a central social action for Web users.

The ShareThis Stream is a real-time view of sharing across the Web, combining the content your friends are sharing with what people are saying about it. Users sign in through Facebook Connect and Twitter, and then can instantly see what their friends have been sharing, the comments surrounding it and Tweets related to the content. You can also dig in a bit and search for content via subject or see what else people are sharing on a specific site. For a more in-depth explanation of the ShareThis Stream, please read this post from Nick Bertrand, our director of product.

We’ve also built in a little something extra for our publishers, who can sign up to get the Stream on their site through our API or widgets. Also, when a user shares something from one of our publishers’ sites, they’ll automatically be shown a list of related shares from that site. All of these new features are designed to drive traffic and engagement on our publishers’ sites.

Like I said before, the ShareThis Stream takes sharing beyond being a simple utility – it allows people using sharing to help them navigate and curate the Web. Conversations usually start around topics – Tiger Woods, Haiti, the Olympics– and the ShareThis Stream helps you easily find those conversations as they happen.

So, come on in, sign in and play around a little bit. And keep sharing.

Tim Schigel
@schigel

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Influence Data > Sharing Data

March 2nd, 2010
 

We’ve seen a number of interesting tidbits on how people are sharing across all the big social channels. We know that sharing is the core of the social web and that sharing is engaging and valuable.

Here’s how sharing behavior has changed on the ShareThis network (130,000 sites) over the last year:

- Email is still a critical part of sharing on the web today, making up 38% of all sharing.
- Facebook has exploded, growing from ~30% to 39% of all sharing on the web.
- Other social channels, such as Digg, Reddit, and others, have dropped from ~20% a year ago to 13% today.
- Twitter was barely registering on our reports a year ago and is now around 8.7% of all our shares.

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Google Buzz Puts Sharing at the Center of the Web

February 9th, 2010
 

Google Buzz_1265765536563.png It’s always exciting to see a big company like Google launch a new product, such as today’s blast-off of Google Buzz. While it’s always nice to have another toy in the social sandbox to play with, today’s announcement sent the ShareThis offices atwitter for a different reason – it had the word “share” all over it. We’ve been like a broken record on this – sharing is the center of the social Web. It’s the crucial act in people’s online interactions, the way that conversations starts and where 90 percent of the value for businesses is. Today’s announcement was validation of all that we’ve been saying.

Look at the dominant media narrative’s coming out of today’s announcement: War! Google vs. Facebook vs. Twitter! And at the center of that war? Sharing. It truly is the connective tissue of the Web. We’re delighted that the big guys have finally figured this out.

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And the Grammy goes to…

February 4th, 2010
 

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Every day many new sites sign up with ShareThis. We are grateful to help their users share and it was a big honor to be the sharing choice for the 52nd Grammy Awards’ official site, especially in a year when social media was such a big part of its success in boosting its audience to a six year high.

At its peak, the Grammy’s website was among the top 5 publishers throughout the ShareThis network and stayed in the top 10 for a while after the event. It’s great to see an event with such long-standing traditions embrace social media so successfully.

On another note, we would like to welcome a few new publishers to the ShareThis network: Break, Travelocity, and Share Some Sugar.

Steve
@steversb

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Sharing and ‘Socialgraphics’: Why Marketers Should Be Paying Attention

January 26th, 2010
 

We’ve talked before about how sharing is the heart of the social Web, a concept that I immediately thought of when watching a recent webinar from Altimeter Group entitled “Understanding Your Customers’ Social Behavior.” The webinar – presented by analysts Charlene Li and Jeremiah Owyang – introduces a concept called “socialgraphics” to help companies understand the social behavior of their customers in order to better understand and engage with them through social channels. The analysts broke social Web use down in to five levels of activity (in ascending order): watching, sharing, commenting, producing and curating.

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Each level is a more engaged Web user, with producing and curating comprising just 10 percent of all people online, while the other 90 percent fall in to watching, sharing and commenting. This is a great illustration of how important sharing on the Web is, and why brands should understand how and why people share things – it is a base activity for Web users. As is referenced in the presentation, ShareThis reported that sharing through our button increased 200 percent in 2009, and another study referenced in the webinar found that 60 percent of American Web users engaged in some type of sharing.

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ShareThis featured in marketing eBook

January 21st, 2010
 

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ShareThis’ Chief Technology Office Nanda Kishore was asked to contribute his thoughts to Key Content Marketing Trends and Predictions For 2010, a new (and free!) eBook by ClickDocuments about the top upcoming trends in content marketing. Nanda contributed his thoughts on the value of sharing for marketers, saying that the ability to share everything online has allowed consumers to direct the flow of information online. He continues:

So what’s next? In 2010, new ways for filtering and measuring the social web will emerge and marketers will realize that technologies and targeting techniques won’t measure up unless they can deliver mass adoption and an aggregated, measurable view of social media value.

Here is the eBook, or you can download a PDF copy. Lots of good tips, tricks and discussion starters in there.

Steve
@steversb

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Hello, Hola, Bonjour, Hallo, Ciao…

January 19th, 2010
 

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ShareThis is going global! Well, sort of…but we have taken the first step in the direction of internationalization by adding support for four additional languages: Spanish, French, German, and Italian. These features are available on any ShareThis widget across the web, or in the new release of our Firefox Add-on.

Beyond sharing in 5 languages, our Firefox add-on is compatible with Firefox 3.6 and allows you to track top shares on any of our 130,000 publisher sites, customize your social services and upload your contacts for faster sharing. Leave us a review on the Mozilla site if you like it!.

We understand that while this is a step in the right direction, there are still many languages out there that ShareThis should be available in. This is where you come in. We are asking you, the citizens of the Internet, to help us out in getting ShareThis translated into as many languages as possible. If you know a language and would be willing translate for us, please give us a shout at language@sharethis.com.

In return, not only will ShareThis be available in your language of choice, we will also feature your blog/website/picture-of-your-cat (what ever you want, within reason) on our blog and through Twitter. You will also be credited with the translation on our site.

Thanks,
Steve
@steversb

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The Art of the Share

January 7th, 2010
 

People are always asking us how to get the most out of their ShareThis button. The bottom line is – good content gets shared, but there are some other things you can do to help. Here are some tips – it’s all about placement and knowing your audience. You want to have your button in a spot where people expect it to be, and it should be recognizable. Here are some of the great implementations from our partners that result in high sharing rates.

Simple & Straightforward: It is at the top of the article, clearly located next to other buttons and the ShareThis name and logo have a clear call to action.

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Social Channel Breakout #1: This one has the functionality broken out into individual services to increase users ability to recognize them and understand their purpose. Notice they are embedded near the top of the article; this is where the most important information is. This is a more custom option so contact us if you want to understand how it’s done.

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