Publishers can set the widget to show only articles on the same topics as what’s covered by their site, or perhaps more importantly (as far as driving traffic is concerned), only other articles from their own site. Publishers will be able to take advantage of the ShareThis algorithms to have the widget display top trending content from their domain (or popular topics in general if they choose).

"The widget is also useful for readers, as it allows them to find more info on their favorite topics, share it with their friends, and see what else their friends are reading and talking about — all in one place," says ShareThis Community Manager Steve Ragan. It will show readers what their friends are sharing across Facebook, Twitter, and Google Buzz, and they can share content with any of those from the widget as well. 

"There’s nothing else out there that takes this approach to social sharing, share velocity or trends," says Ragan.

The widget has the potential to be very useful for driving traffic. In some ways it might be more helpful than Facebook’s social plugins. The fact that it features not only Facebook, but Twitter and Buzz is one obvious advantage (nobody’s saying you should stop using Facebook’s stuff too). 

The biggest problem I see with the widget is that it is one more thing to clutter up your site. There are so many social, sharing tools out there, it can get to be overkill. If you’re already using a bunch of them. It’s probably a good idea to evaluate which ones are effective and which are just taking up precious space. That said, this widget might serve as a good replacement or complement to what you’ve already got. 

If you’re not a publisher, you might think a tool like this won’t help you. All you need to be a publisher is a blog, and there are plenty of reasons why any business can benefit from one of those. Facebook is showing how important content is. We discussed why blogging is more critical than ever here. Perhaps video might work better for you. Google TV is going to make a huge impact on the web. Are you ready for that? 

Are you content with your ability to measure social media effectiveness? Let us know.

ShareThis, which reaches 400 million people a month through social media share buttons across content all over the web, has released some new metrics for measuring social media effectiveness.

One of the metrics is its Audience Index, which lets publishers understand and compare their social audiences against 850,000 other sites (and soon against categories), find out what types of influencers your site attracts, and find out how well you connect with influencers, listeners, and engaged customers.

The other metric might be even more useful. That would be "Social Reach".

"We recently surveyed publishers (ours and others) and found that over 60% wanted (and were missing) social referral analytics," ShareThis explains on the company blog. "Social Reach measures the true value of shared media across the web by looking at outbound sharing and inbound social traffic and, in the process, gives proper credit to the listener/responder of a share as much as the original influencer/sharer. Publishers can now get a more accurate measurement of how a piece of content circulates around the Web after it’s been shared across any service, rather than just the simple number of shares counted by a single service like Facebook."

"Social Reach is built in to all of ShareThis’ new share buttons that we introduced a couple of weeks ago, and the Social Reach score of each piece of content can be displayed on any page where our buttons are installed," the company says.

ShareThis shared some interesting stats regarding Social Reach with TechCrunch. For example, according to the company, Facebook accounts for 45 percent of all shared content across its network, followed by email with 34 percent, and Twitter with 12 percent.

While Facebook may get more shares from ShareThis, email appears to be more effective, as people are more likely to click on an emailed link (31 percent out of the 34 percent, compared with 36 percent out of FB’s 44 percent).

Either way, the metrics could prove to be very useful for publishers looking at optimizing their social media marketing strategies.

What tools do you use to measure social media effectiveness? Share with other WebProNews readers.

However, getting there isn’t always that easy. The first steps though is ensuring you have social media links on your blog to make sharing that content easy. My favorite tool of the moment for this is ShareThis.

ShareThis use to be a plugin for Wordpres that injected social media icons, and an email this, link into your posts. It worked very well but was WordPress only until recently. It’s since been re-launched as a service that’ll work across any blogging platform or website.

Signing up for a ShareThis account is really easy. They just ask for your email address and a password. This information is then used to track the ShareThis button performance on your site. It’ll keep track of who’s clicking which options, your most popular content and other visitor information. However, the reports are not yet available for the public but should be by the end of the year.

Once you’re signed in, you can create your custom ShareThis button. Choose colors, social media buttons, icon and email feature. It’ll then output a piece of JavaScript to put on your site and start tracking right away.

The nice thing about ShareThis is it only takes up a small amount of screen space. Once the link is clicked on, the larger window with all the options shows.

Other social bookmark plugins have the same functionality but lack the tracking piece. It’ll be interesting to see how this works as it gets more users.

Another option that ShareThis has is the ability to incorporate a ShareThis button directly into your browser. Clicking on it will give you all the social media options and allow you to easily submit any page you navigate to to one of many social media sites. The button comes in the form of a Firefox Extension, Internet Explorer addon or even a bookmarklet for other browsers such as Safari and Opera.

Downsides to ShareThis is that you’re limited to the number of social services available. It has all the main ones but some users may want more. This is kind of a good thing though as to many options can be overwhelming for some visitors. You’ll also have to figure out where you want to add the code in your template. I’m not a huge fan of where I put mine, but I’ll test it out for a while. It didn’t work as well where I wanted it but that’s a design issue I have to work out. It does seem to take up more room that the old ShareThis button use to.

ShareThis looks to be a very useful addition to any blog, website or browser. It’ll help make your posts easier to promote in the social space and additional exposure is always good.

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