You’ve likely seen these icons to the left when visiting many of your favorite blogs. These tools allow readers to share information on social media sites.
If you see these icons at the bottom of a blog post, click on them and they will expand to show different social networking and bookmarking sites. Choose a site like Facebook or Twitter, and it will give you the option to post the link and write a comment on your profile. With ShareThis, you can even enter a phone number and text someone an article!
If you’re still thinking this sounds difficult, click on the ShareThis icon below, choose Facebook, Linkedin or Twitter and login – you’ll have this blog article posted in seconds.
These tools can be included on your own blog for free. Sharethis, AddThis and Tell a Friend are online services. To use them, you simply create an account and get a snippet of code to embed on your blog. If you are working with popular blog hosting platforms like Blogger or WordPress, you can tell these tools what blog site you use and they will add the code for you. Offering these sharing options to your readers is a great way to get them to promote your content for you.
You also get reporting tools that show you which of your content is getting shared the most and which content isn’t. With this information, you can gain insight into what articles your followers are most likely to be interested in and tailor your new posts for your audience.
When your readers share your information, the inbound link they post to their network will also help you to search engine optimize your site.
