Does your website have “share this” functionality?

How many times have you been on a web site and thought,” John would be interested in this, I’ll send him the link”, unless you don’t have a friend called John of course. But to let John know you have had to copy the URL from your browser address bar, open your Email client, create a new email, copy in the link, put a subject line in so your email don’t get classed as spam, and send it.

How much easier would it be to just share the link via a button. So what are your options?

• Email – The site link will usually open up a web form with the link, subject and short message already completed allowing you to just pop in your own and your friends email addresses and send.
• Social media – You will need to be logged into your chosen SM account before you can post a share, but if this is your chosen weapon of choice you are probably already logged in. This is as simple as it comes.
• Blogs – You can do what I am doing here and pass this information on via a blog.
• Instant messaging – MSN, Skype, Google Talk, etc. are all very simple to share with so a button might just copy the page link to your clipboard for inserting into your chat tool.
• Message boards or Newsgroups – Again this will involve you adding a link and a comment onto your chosen medium so a copy feature would save several mouse or finger movements.

With the huge increase in smartphones and tablets making your share function simple to use and finger friendly is worthy of serious consideration.

eMarketer just did a bit of research on sharing, see it here https://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?R=1008395 and it’s surprising how much we still use email. With all the hype around social media email is still very important so don’t ignore this as a sharing option.

Services like AddThis (https://www.addthis.com/) and ShareThis (https://sharethis.com/) make adding a share option very easy for even the smallest business. They even include analytics so you can see who’s sharing what. In an online world where peer recommendations are becoming the biggest influencer in decision making share functionality should be on all web sites.

So what are you waiting for?