Has Jakob Nielsen Researched This?

An AddThis Widget

I'm trying to decide on the best location of an AddThis widget for a certain magazine site, so I took a look at some of the biggest mainstream media sites to see how they place their SNS links in their articles. Here's a breakdown of the placement in various sites, some big name, some niche, but all of them useful for a discussion about what to do with these ubiquitous posting widgets.

• New York Times - The share link is to the right of the first paragraph, often front and center of the page.
• Wall Street Journal - Bottom of the article
• Thesaurus.com- Bottom of the article
• Washington Post - To the right of the articles' bylines.
• Daily Tar Heel - Bottom of the article
• NPR - Share link at top of articles jumps to bottom.
• TechRepublic - Digg only, at the top of the page
• CNET - Digg, Reddit, and del.icio.us at the bottom of the article
• PointsInCase - Top and bottom of the article

The two primary decisions to make when implementing this sharing feature are where to place the widget and what services to support. As it turns out, these questions are tightly coupled, so the order in which you address them can determine how you use the posting widget.

We need to find out how to best place the posting widget so that, hopefully, readers will send it along to friends or vote it onto the front page of a news aggregating service. Some factors that may influence the placement are the contents of the article and general information-seeking/sharing habits of people. Let's look more closely at what these factors imply:

1. Content of the article
• What is the length or size of this article? Sometimes the widget can go at the bottom of an article because it will remain "above the fold," a user would not have to scroll down to share the article.
• What is the article about? This can influence the target audience consideration, which in turn influences the social networking services one may feature for promotion. Most importantly, it will decide whether or not the article is shared at all.
2. General Information-seeking/Sharing habits
• Can people glean the gist of an article through its headline, first paragraph, or caption? That may be enough to have people pass it along.
• The widget needs to be convenient. Putting it at the bottom of the article is good for people who read the entire thing. However, it implies that an audience should digest an article before sharing it with others.
  

I'll look more into this second criterion, but to summarize, knowing the nature of the audience and the material are instrumental in deciding how to deploy the posting widget. In the next installment of this subject, we'll consider what services should be put in the limelight and come to a verdict about what the best practice is for the posting widget.