If you want to build natural links and promote your content on social media networks, you need to make sharing easy. It seems every blog has a different sharing widget and it can be confusing to find the best option available. I recommend using AddThis and the reason is because of the flexible customization options and extensive social sharing analytics it provides. The only way to truly understand your blog visitors is to measure your visitor engagement. AddThis has a number of useful features that sets it above the competition:

• Content Analytics: See which blog posts are being shared and explore how the post has been shared - how often, and where.
• Easy Google Analytics integration: AddThis makes it easy to integrate social sharing data into your existing Google Analytics reports.
• Clickback Tracking: Measure how much traffic is generated by social sharing on your blog and which posts are most successful.
• Sharing Insights: Discover how your users use popular social sharing platforms like Facebook, Twitter and StumbleUpon.
• Flexible API: If you want to get technical, the AddThis Analytics API gives you extensive control over your sharing data.

1. What Exactly is AddThis?

   This informative video explains the basics of why you should use AddThis and how it facilitates social sharing. Best of all, AddThis is free, easy to set up and it integrates with your blog. They even provide custom widgets for simple integration with Blogger, Tumblr, Drupal, Joomla, Wordpress, MySpace and even an e-mail newsletter.

2. Planning Your Social Sharing Strategy

   If you want to plan which social sharing networks to target in your social media strategy, AddThis provides useful data to help you decide. Take a look at the chart below to see the top 10 social sharing platforms on the Internet.

   

   As you can see in the chart above, Facebook, Twitter and E-mail dominate almost 60% of social sharing. Depending on your particular niche, the social sharing platforms used can be different so the best way to find out is by installing AddThis and analysing data from your own website.

3. How To Get Started with AddThis?

   To get started, visit the AddThis website and choose own custom implementation. I personally prefer the new Tweet + Like + Share widget that allows visitors to "Like" your post on Facebook with a single click. Once you've chosen your AddThis social sharing buttons all you have to do is add the code or the widget to your blog, wait a few days and you will start seeing Analytics data in your AddThis account.