Josh Sherman
Hey you! Yes, you. You with that blog over there. The one without any sharing widgets whatsoever. Do you really think your content is so fucking special that people are going to go out of their way to copy and paste the link to share it? You expect us to come up with some witty quip about it? You think we want to figure out what your Twitter handle is so we can tag you in it too?
You may be right… sometimes. For the most part I avoid sharing things when they lack the tools to allow me to do so with as little friction as possible. The rare exception is when the content is damn near life changing, which most of the blogs out there (including this one) are not.
This is not even some outlandish plea on my part. These tools already exist for free. AddThis, ShareThis, even SumoMe has expanded their sharing widget offerings. That’s assuming you don’t just implement the platform’s own widgets directly. Those are free and easy to use as well.
I touched on this topic previously in my tips for new bloggers post. After I posted that, I started to take notice of how often I ran into content that lacked sharing widgets. Loose metrics, at least 30-40% of the posts lacked a way to easily share the content. Of those, another 25% or so would include a button or two to follow their accounts and nothing more. This reminds me of a quote from Office Space:
The thing is, Bob, it’s not that I’m lazy, it’s that I just don’t care.
Yes, I liked your post, but I don’t care to jump through hoops when you could take a few minutes and add this functionality. HELP ME HELP YOU!
