Is there any research or statistics that show adding share links to your site content areas increases sharing?

Question

Just wondering if there is any documentation out there that having share links to your content actually encourages and increases sharing of the content?

Answer 1

I don't know of anything for websites, but I found this about email. Admittedly it's from a vendor selling share-to-social service, but it does have some stats:

http://www.silverpop.com/news/press/share-to-social-performance.html

Answer 2

If your question is, "does having sharing buttons on your site result in more shares compared with having no sharing buttons", then I think the answer's likely to be a resounding "yes!", purely from experience of adding social buttons to my own sites and to customers' sites; it has always increased shares, even on low-traffic sites.

If you're still in any doubt, though, you could test it for yourself. The AddThis service has a detailed analytics feature that gives you an overview of the numbers of shares and incoming traffic you're getting from each social network.