It’s rare to visit any website today and not be met with an array of social widgets, whether it’s a  button linking to a Facebook or Twitter page or something which enables site visitors to comment, like, share and bookmark across a wide variety of social media platforms. Social widgets typically allow users to share directly from publishers. While this increases their distribution of content and helps generate web-traffic, the benefits are often one-sided.

When a user shares via a Facebook or Twitter widget, the publisher doesn’t gain any insight from the data it records. Equally when web tools like AddThis or ShareThis are installed, publishers miss out on new revenue streams. Both are benefits publishers may have not realised were available to them. Read More »