Social media integration solutions

Question

Another question someone posted got me thinking, what are the social media integration solutions that everyone uses? The most common solutions I've come across are the content-sharing buttons:

• ShareThis
• AddThis
• AddToAny

How many of you use these or other social media integration solutions? Or do you just create your own sharing buttons? What advantages are there to using these 3rd-party solutions versus creating your own buttons using Facebook/Del.icio.us/Digg/etc.'s code?

Another solution I've been coming across more and more, and that I really dislike, are those fixed social media toolbars that many sites put at the bottom of your screen. They stick out like a sore thumb and take up valuable screen real-estate and just look very tacky IMO. How many people use those, and what advantage do you see to using those branded social sharing toolbars?

Are there any other solutions out there that you guys would recommend?

Answer 1

We used to use AddThis on sites, and we liked the fact that it was easy to implement and offered everything (a couple of years back the market was more fragmented, before Facebook and Twitter dominated).

However, the stats were very disappointing, and we put this down to the fact that people were less likely to interact with a widget that they didn't instantly recognise as linking directly to their preferred social widget.

We therefore moved to dedicated buttons (specifically for Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Flickr). The usage was several orders of magnitude higher.

In terms of ease of use, most social networking sites make it incredibly easy to add these buttons to sites, so the advantages of services like AddThis are reduced.

I agree, some of the bars that sit at the bottom of the screen are just irritating noise. Hopefully they will go away soon.

Answer 2

Note about Facebook share buttons, you can control the link text that will appear on facebook when people share your content. To make facebook read your guidelines from your website you need to use several tags.

Facebook describe their tags on the OpenGraph Protocol page. If you believe that facebook links are good for SEO, you might want to optimize the anchor texts. Otherwise it is just generally good to control what text friends of your users see when your content is shared.

Regarding the original question, I am still trying to find a solution that will get added within a noindex,nofollow iframe to my pages. Since by using SexyBookmarks I found in Google Webmaster Tools that the most relevant words to my blog posts are "png", "sexybookmarks", etc... and it just feels very wrong to see that in there.