Socialize your blog and web content

Some of you may have noticed that we recently updated this blog with a redesign that includes much better integration with popular social networks. The redesign is part of our strategy to engage more with you and provide you with more relevant, real-time information that will help you be successful on the web. For this to work, our blog (and other web properties) needed to be updated so that it was much easier to interact with sites such as Facebook and Twitter. The more our content gets out, the more people we can reach and help.

When our team started working on the updates to this blog, we needed to decide how we would actually implement the social connections. We could have done it ourselves but that would be have tough to maintain and update as the social networks change and update. After doing some digging, we ran across a company called AddThis that has a SaaS based product that was just what we were looking for. Not only that, it had a WordPress plug-in that made adding it to this blog a snap.

What is Addthis? Its a simple (and FREE) service that allows you to add a variety of social share and like buttons to any page on your website or blog. All you do is configure how you want your buttons to look and copy and paste a snippet of code into your site. They also have plug-ins for the most popular content management and blogging platforms to make it even easier. One of the cool things about AddThis is that they provide analytics to show you who is clicking/liking/sharing what so you can tell what content.

We like AddThis so much, that we recently added native support for it in CafeCommerce so that you can easily enable AddThis on any of your product pages with a click of a button. This allows your customers to share products that they like and hopefully drive more traffic to your site. For our Dreamweaver customers, we have the Social Media Toolkit extension that allows you to add social share buttons to any web page you are developing. Look out for more cool technology from us that will help your web content be more social.