Why I don't use integrated bookmark widgets like AddThis

As normal I was going through my comments and Gemma posted an interesting question that I felt required a post to answer. She commented:

Great article! I would suggest using something like the Add This! or the Share This social bookmarking button rather than putting individual buttons on your website. It saves space and offers more choices for your readers.

While what she's saying makes a lot of sense, I felt it worth explaining why I disagree with her seemingly rational statement.

What is AddThis?
AddThis are a startup who allow you to create custom bookmarking widgets to add to your website. Because it's so hard to promote every single popular bookmarking on the website they create a little widget for you that does all the hard work. It's a small item that sits on your page and offers users the ability to bookmark you on lots of different services.

How does it work?
You put the widget/image on your website, which is pretty small and looks like this:

When a user clicks on it, they're given a pop-up window like this:

I've faded out the rest of the page apart from the AddThis widget and the pop-up window to avoid confusion. The pop-up window will take the user to whatever service they click on, ready to bookmark your page. Simple huh? It's certainly an effective widget.

So why don't I use it?
It's too small. Look at the size of the button, it gets lost on the page and has no real "call to action" on it. Sure it says "Bookmark" and offers you a couple of icons, but it's a lot more hassle (for the user) to click that, wait for the pop-up, select Del.icio.us and then login to them, then add the page... You could instead just integrate the del.icio.us unit into your page that makes the whole process a lot nicer.

It's that trade off between lots of options and good real estate
It's good (in theory) because it occupies very little space and offers users the ability to bookmark it in any number of services. However it's so small and doesn't really invite clicks, so I doubt anyone really uses them. It's far better to have a custom unit somewhere on the page inviting action.

So my advice: pick a couple and promote them
Ultimately you can't have everything, so I'd pick a couple of big traffic sources and promote them individually. The Digg widget is a really easy thing to add and it can help pick up support from the site. Same goes for the Reddit one.

So that's why I don't use them - it's a simple case of usability. If they're not an obvious "call to action" then users won't click on it (unless they specifically know what it is and they can be bothered with it). I recommend thinking long and hard about which services you want to promote (i.e. which you get the most success with) and push those.

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