Introducing Our Newest Sharing Experience
We’re happy to announce major updates to the AddThis sharing tool suite: the new design we’ve been testing in AddThis Labs graduates today, with a slew of new features. Go grab the new code!
We’ve written before about the mind-boggling amount of data every day, and how we use it to provide insights both to our publishers and into trends across our network. But we also use data to drive and refine our own processes and designs. Today, we’ve used what we’ve learned to make sharing even easier, and more personal. That means more engagement from your visitors, more sharing, and more traffic for your site.
Simpler design.
First, we have a new look. We’ve streamlined and simplified the compact menu. We’ve made our email form a lot easier to use, like the email clients you’re already familiar with. Our expanded menu’s been optimized for faster sharing to the most popular services in your region, and easier searching for your personal favorites. (As always, we’ll highlight the services you use for even easier sharing next time.) We’ll take advantage of jQuery on pages that already include it for simple but lovely transitions. And while our new platform takes advantage of HTML5 and loads of modern browser features, we won’t leave you out in the cold if you’re stuck on IE6–though, seriously guys, it’s time.
In Labs, the updated design increased sharing by 11%. In production, it’s going to do even better–due to our second major update.
Instant sharing.
Sharing to Facebook or Twitter used to mean popping a new window. That’s fast, but we figured if we made it even faster, more people would be sharing your content. To that end, we’re introducing “instant” inline sharing to the most popular social networks. If your users link their social accounts with AddThis, they’ll be able to share directly to Facebook or Twitter without even leaving your page. The new inline interface means there’s no extra page load–that means more unimpeded sharing. Even better, once a user authenticates, they’ll remain logged in on every single site with AddThis, until they log out. Everybody wins.
Adding social sign in to our sharing tools doesn’t just mean it’s easier to share. It also means it’s a lot easier to personalize your AddThis experience–easily choose the services you want to see once, and you’ll see them across all the sites that use AddThis.
Pain-free pinning.Our recent updates for Pinterest are fully integrated with the new design. We’ve created the simplest and easiest way to integrate with Pinterest: almost no work necessary! Put AddThis on any page you want to make pinnable, and we’ll show a simple, elegant lightbox to showcase all the images on your page for your users to pick from. You can always specify your own image, too, if you want! We’ve found this feature can boost sharing to Pinterest by 20% or more.
You can add all these capabilities to your site with one simple code snippet. Take a look and try it out!
Our plugins for WordPress, Magento, and Shopify will be updated this week to support the new surfaces.
Questions? Comments? As always, we’d love your feedback.
To start off on the right track, we spent two days with our executives defining business goals and the specific groups of customers we wanted to reach. Then the group had some fun with word association, brainstorming phrases that each person felt captured the “feel” of the brand. This helped us decide which aspects of our new visual identity were most important, but also helped build consensus around the evolving creative direction.
From there we looked at different color palettes, fonts, and image styles to arrive at a design that was more light and friendly, but still captured how much we love big social data and statistics. In the end we hoped to maintain some of the heritage of AddThis, but also spread our wings a bit with an expanded visual vocabulary.
