Add This Links

Submitted by Giovanna Guerrero-Medina on

Giovanna Guerrero-Medina's picture
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We have "Add This" buttons on our old website for most major content. Can you add something similar here?

9 Comments

James O'Malley's picture

Added Google+ Facebook

Submitted by James O'Malley on

Added Google+ Facebook Twitter and linkedIn.  There are other social networking options as well, but those were the ones I activated.  I don't like the anytoadd widget, because it filters all calls through the addtoany website.  They are essentially tracking you as part of their terms of use.  I have investigated their service, and although I don't believe they are doing anything creepy, their terms of use and technology enable them to do whatever they like with shared/linked/liked content.  Sometimes it also slows the site down.  The module I installed is just between your website and the respective services - no third party linking service.

Giovanna Guerrero-Medina's picture

Now I see them! Great! Could

Submitted by Giovanna Guerrero-Medina on

Now I see them! Great! Could you place them underneath the title as opposed to at the bottom of the content? How can I access this module. I don't see access to this anywhere? How can we see the tracked results?

James O'Malley's picture

Those are not internal

Submitted by James O'Malley on

Those are not internal buttons, but links to the respective social networking services.  Those buttons report the "likes" "shares" etc.  You will see them under the title of the article.  There is no other way to track those, as they are explicitedly tracking clicks only to their respective sites.  Facebook will report the clicks to you through the widget, but will not allow you to store them yourself.  That said, I find that a good way to see how effective social media tracking is to look at your weblogs and see how much inbound traffic they generate.  

To reiterate, as soon as someone "shares" the link, you will see it reflected on the button. 

Giovanna Guerrero-Medina's picture

I understand how these

Submitted by Giovanna Guerrero-Medina on

I understand how these buttons work but it would be nice to know how many people like the content on our page enough to share or like it, regardless of whether it produces traffic back to the site or not. This information would help us quantify and analyze the impact of our content among our members. It seems this article has some suggestions for how to do this through Google Analytics http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/how-to-track-tweets-facebook-likes-and-more-with-google-analytics/, which reminds me, do we need to set up Google Analytics for our website? We had it set up for the old one and I would like it on the new one.

James O'Malley's picture

That's what I am saying.

Submitted by James O'Malley on

That's what I am saying.  What those snippets of javascript are is simply a way to report to the remote service so that you can see it in THEIR reporting which you also see on the buttons on your website.  As it stands you will see the likes, tweets, etc, but there is no way to capture or aggregate those numbers on your end.  You will only be able to see it through their services.  I will put it in, but you also have to realize that every single remote resource you add to your website is going to slow it down.

For setting up google analytics, I will just cut and paste the code from your old site into the new one when we do the switch over.

James O'Malley's picture

Oh wait, I see what you're

Submitted by James O'Malley on

Oh wait, I see what you're saying now.  You can allow google to hi-jack some of the social media likes.  I will need the appropriate updated code snippet from google analytics.  I will integrate the other code snippets to report some of the tracking.

Giovanna Guerrero-Medina's picture

OK. I went to our Google

Submitted by Giovanna Guerrero-Medina on

OK. I went to our Google Analytics page and didn't quite see what the article said I would see. I did however find this Google article: http://support.google.com/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1316556

You can log into our analytics account with contact@cienciapr.org (Password: Vieques.07!)

Maybe you can figure out how to change the code?

I'm setting this to a lower priority b/c it might be too complicated and not high priority for now...