Inducing people to share information and links has become a major draw on the Web. It’s all about pushing traffic flow back to a site and boosting ad revenue.
New-age companies like ShareThis and AddThis, considered the emerging players if this domain, are syndicating their catalog of sharing buttons to major websites free of charge. In the process, they’re generating revenue by ‘selling’ information back to Web publishers as well as their advertisers about who is sharing, and also how much of it! Shareaholic is another year-old start-up firm that offers free sharing software. It works seamlessly with the Firefox browser.
Meanwhile, publishers are thinking of ways to persuade their readers to share more data, in much the same manner they employ ‘search engine optimization’ so they will rank higher in results of top search engines. They state, a personal recommendation can be equally powerful as a Google referral.
In the age of social networking, powerful platforms like Facebook and Twitter have clearly emerged as the hotspots. In keeping with the trend, the hand-delivered copy from traditional media organizations has morphed into a succinct article’s ‘share to Facebook’ button. New proponents of Internet (data) sharing say that they are trying to make the task simpler for users.
All of this clearly raises a possibility of some friction on the Internet. Search engines like Google have invariably frowned on the smart search-engine optimizers, trying to ‘sway’ their algorithms into higher rankings for websites.
The question is will social sites look askew at these innovative ‘social media optimizers’, deploying new ideas to have users share content on the Internet.
