The vertical bar comes in a variety of sizes. By default, it floats on the top left side of the page, to make your sharing tools always visible. It’s easy to implement and won’t interfere with your site.

If you’ve installed this tool on your site, drop us a line so we can feature it. Here are some folks using it:

drizzydrake.org

Last week we changed our name and launched two new tools. We also changed our site’s design to celebrate our new brand identity. Here’s a quick look at how we made that happen.

To start off on the right track, we spent two days with our executives defining business goals and the specific groups of customers we wanted to reach. Then the group had some fun with word association, brainstorming phrases that each person felt captured the “feel” of the brand. This helped us decide which aspects of our new visual identity were most important, but also helped build consensus around the evolving creative direction.

From there we looked at different color palettes, fonts, and image styles to arrive at a design that was more light and friendly, but still captured how much we love big social data and statistics. In the end we hoped to maintain some of the heritage of AddThis, but also spread our wings a bit with an expanded visual vocabulary.

One of our favorite parts of the new design is our home page, the first to include live data. Visitors can watch sharing happen all over the world, and discover interesting facts we’ve uncovered from the huge amount of data we see every day.

So what do you think? We love feedback in all shapes and sizes, so drop us a comment below. And as always, thanks for using AddThis.

Here’s a quick summary of the new stuff.

Welcome bar
The Welcome bar is all about optimizing your site for your incoming visitors. It lets you look at where your visitors are coming from, determines what type of visitor they are, and welcomes them with a specific call-to-action.  These calls-to-action are presented as a horizontal bar at the top of the page containing custom messages and action buttons.

These actions will help you optimize for specific goals such as increasing follower counts, growing registrations by rewarding loyalty, and more. For example, want to increase membership by offering a free trial to returning visitors? It’s easy.

As with all AddThis social plugins, you’ll get in-depth insights into how the Welcome bar is performing via a new module in your analytics summary.

Trending content box
When you use AddThis to power sharing for your site, our data-processing platform knows which content is working for you across your social channels.  The Trending content box is a customizable plugin that helps you surface this content to drive more traffic within your site.  Designed to fit seamlessly into your pages and automatically feature the most trending, popular, or network-specific content, the Trending content box helps to increase overall traffic and site retention.  Want to customize the look of your Trending content box? No problem – we’ve designed it to be completely configurable to match your site’s look-and-feel.

As for analytics, there’s a new module on the summary report that shows you how many additional pageviews this plugin is generating for you.

Like the Welcome bar, the Trending content box interface is fully-customizable via APIs — you can grab a great experience out of the box, or make it blend in seamlessly with the rest of your site.

Engagement Analytics
On top of the analytics we’ve added for the Welcome bar and Trending content box, you’ll notice something else the next time you log into your analytics console.  We’re now showing you copied-text data — key words and phrases your visitors are copying out of your pages. You can see which text is resonating, and which keywords might help you attract new visitors via SEO or potentially keep your visitors engaged longer.

AddThis now gives you the richest real-time view of your social lifecycle.  Building on our recently announced Follower reporting, and the full-lifecycle social analytics you already know and love (including our address bar tracking), this new copied-text reporting provides another piece of your social optimization puzzle.  And again, its not just about analytics — this data powers all of our social plugins.

We’ll be diving deeper into each of these new capabilities, and the ways in which you can use them to drive traffic and engagement, in followup posts over the coming week or two.  For now, check em out and let us know what you think!

What the heck is it?

Web Intents is an open specification being developed within the W3C process. It allows web pages to more easily and securely invoke external services on behalf of users. In plain English, this spec is a way for a web browser to help users connect to useful services on the web for performing certain common actions — things like save, share, and print.

For example, a web page can indicate that it contains some content a user might want to save. A user’s browser can detect that, help the user choose a suitable service, and then actually save the content. Same goes for printing, even for the most basic type of sharing — sending a URL to some other service.

You can learn more about Web Intents and what they can do at webintents.org or the W3C site.

How does AddThis work with Web Intents?

We’re announcing 3 things today. All of the bits are either already deployed or will be rolling out over the coming days.

1. AddThis sharing tools can invoke Web Intents.

AddThis social tools are the easiest way to integrate sharing functionality into your site. That’s not just true for deploying Pinterest, Facebook, or over 300 other services and custom interfaces — it’s also true for access to basic Web Intents. When a developer includes AddThis in a page, users immediately get access to any intent handlers that are registered with their browser. No handlers registered? That’s ok too, it won’t hurt anything and you’ll still get AddThis-powered sharing and analytics as usual.

2. AddThis makes Web Intents work, even if the browser doesn’t support them.

By adding AddThis to a page, a site developer can feel free to use Web Intents to initiate sharing actions. AddThis makes sure the handlers are there, and lets users invoke the tools and share content, even without any browser support. Site developers can relax and not worry about figuring out a complex matrix of browser support for their pages.

3. AddThis sharing tools can handle sharing actions.

If a page includes a share intent, AddThis can handle it. End users can share content to any of our 300+ services. AddThis ensures that web intents retains all the flexibility of current sharing tools from day one.

What next?

We’re extremely excited to help take another step toward open sharing by supporting and participating in the work on this emerging specification. We’ll be continuing to add support to our products and talking more about implementation details here and in our docs. We’ll also be talking quite a bit more about Web Intents to users, site operators, and the over 300 service providers we’ve integrated with across the globe. We’ll be releasing tools to make Web Intents support easier and more valuable for all of them.

The more progress the web is able to make on the mechanics of sending content from point A to point B, the more AddThis can stay focused on the optimization, analytics, and unique social experiences that you’ve come to expect from us and our tools. Check back on this blog to stay up-to-date on our support and ongoing product enhancements around Web Intents.

To the Open Web,

Team AddThis

Replace the URL of the image the pin is on, and place this within the <HEAD></HEAD> of the page:

<meta property="og:image" content="http://YOUR-DOMAIN.com/IMAGE.jpg"/>

You might even have this line of code already on each page of your site. This open graph tag is used by multiple services, including Pinterest and Facebook, to display an image with the shared content.

We recently discussed the popularity of Pinterest and since, the service has continued to grow. Because we are so enthusiastic about everyone’s penchant for pinning, here are some fun facts from the AddThis network:

• Content is shared to Pinterest (11%) via mobile devices more than Facebook (7%) and Twitter (9%)
• Almost 35% of all content shared to Pinterest via AddThis is food. NOM!
• The US, UK, Canada and Australia are all the most socially engaged countries on Pinterest

Dont forget, we also support the Pinterest “Pin It” button, if that’s your preferred implementation. One of the biggest advantages of leveraging the AddThis Pinterest sharing tools is the great insights you will gain through our analytics about how your users are “pinning” your content.

Now get back to your boards, people.

Merchants on Shopify get access to over 300 social channels including Pinterest, Facebook and Twitter in addition to real-time analytics showing how socially viral their products are. This real-time data can help you increase traffic and engagement to your store resulting in increased sales.

AddThis for Shopify has even been featured 10 helpful new Shopify Apps. Let us know if we can do anything to make AddThis work even better on your Shopify store.

As with all our tools, we want to give you insight into how the buttons are performing, so make sure you sign up for the AddThis analytics to see which channels your users are going to and even more than that – which pages on your site are actually generating the followers.

If you have any questions, please feel free to head to our support page and we’ll help you get some answers.

We’ve updated the AddThis menu with some great new sharing services. Those services include:

• Chime.in: a great service that allows you to connect around your interests
• Beat100: a video sharing site
• BufferApp: this service helps you to schedule sharing on your social media channels
• Surfingbird.ru: a site from Russia that gathers the best content from around the social web

You’ll also notice a something in our menu that prompts you to Write Your Rep. This is an amazing service from RaiseYourVoice.us. RaiseYourVoice is a service that helps citizens easily contact elected representatives and connect with organizations supporting their aims.

If you are on a site that uses the AddThis sharing widget, click the Write Your Rep service and you will be prompted to enter your zip code. The tool will then find your local reps and candidates and let you send them a message!

RaiseYourVoice is a service we are especially excited about offering, as we believe civic involvement is very important. It is an election year after all — let your voice be heard!

What is Text Copy Tracking?

Text Copy Tracking is a new feature that measures the text users copy to their clipboards from your site. We do not track what users do with these copied keywords, but it is likely that many are put into a search engine. These keywords should give you a better idea of your audience’s specific interests and reveal opportunities to keep users engaged with your site. For privacy reasons, we omit any copies that appear to be a URL, an email address, or a phone number. You can use it on any page, but it will only be active for site visitors who are using a supported browser.

Do I need to upgrade my AddThis plugin to get text copy tracking?

No, we will be able to push this change automatically, all you have to do is sit back and start watching your analytics live view. If you want to turn off text copytracking you will have to update to the latest AddThis plugin for either Blogger or WordPress.

What happens if I want to turn off copy text tracking?

We understand some users may not want this feature, and we will still give users a way to disable text copy tracking. If you are a WordPress user make sure you have installed the latest version, 2.3.2 or greater, you can find the text copy track preference under the AddThis settings’ Advanced tab. On Blogger, if you installed our gadget you can check the box to opt out of text copy tracking via the settings page. For our Blogger widget you need to edit the code in the widget to include the addthis_config and set data_track_textcopy to false.

As always feedback is appreciated via comments below.

The Summary and Service reports show you a side-by-side comparison of your followers on different Services. In the Content Trends report, you will notice a new column in the Top Content table titled Follows. This number shows you how many fans or follows you garnered from that specific URL.

This is another addition to our suite of tools that allow you, as a publisher and website owner, to know exactly what content is driving not only social activity via shares, but actual followers of your brand. These types of social users are especially powerful as they care enough about your product that they want to receive updates and interact on a deeper level than just a one time share.

To start tracking your pages that are acquiring you the most followers, hop on over to our Follow Tools area and grab your buttons. We provide integration for multiple networks including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and more.

Do you find this type of data valuable? What other kind of information are you looking for from your analytics consoles? We’d love to hear from you!

To get AddThis for Magento, just go to the Get AddThis page, download the extension, and follow the instructions to install. Don’t forget to register to receive free analytics.

If you have any questions, please visit our support center.

To get the Foursquare button, just add some code to your current AddThis implementation. The documents to do this can be found here. If you have any questions, please feel free to visit our help center.

Other new services that have been added to our menu and immediately available for your users are Azadegi, Bland takkinn, Blogkeen, BO.LT, CleanPrint, ClipDO, Jolly, Mendeley, PoliticNote, QRSrc, Research Gate, WebMoney.ru and to.ly.

Which pages are trending, right now? Which searches are bringing traffic to your site, and what words are visitors copying in order to search or email friends? What interests your visitors, and what are they saying about your website or blog? Find out the answers to these questions using your newly expanded AddThis Analytics Live View.

What’s Live View?

The AddThis Analytics Live View provides a look at what’s happening right now, across your site or for a specific page, including:

• A map showing where people are interacting with your pages
• A list of your top content, right now, based on shares and traffic back to your site
• Your viewers’ interests, and what they’re saying about your content on Twitter

The Live View also introduces new types of information to help you understand how your audience is interacting with your site:

• Searches: How many searches are bringing traffic to your site? What are your visitors looking for? Live View displays a list of top search keywords and phrases.
• Text copy tracking: While searches indicate what brought users to your site, text that visitors copy can help you understand what they found interesting, and whether these keywords align with your search meta-data to help maximize SEO. Learn more…

Zoom Into a Page

Interested in a particular page that’s trending? Zoom in for a closer look by clicking on it’s title, and discover how your visitors are interacting with that page, what searches brought them there, and what your audience is saying about that page on Twitter.

What do you think?

We’d love to hear what you think about the new AddThis Analytics Live View. Drop us a line in our forum with your feedback, and if you have any questions or need technical support, please visit our new Support Center.

• Check out your Live View

These updated tools are designed to boost sharing by showing more of the viewer’s personalized services as a simple, friendly list. We’ve also redesigned and expanded the AddThis email form to be even easier to use.

If you want to try out these buttons for your own site they are available here.

Please let us know if you have any questions or feedback – we’d love to hear from you.

Pinterest is a rapidly-growing image sharing social network which according to Businessweek has seen traffic grow 7x in the past 5 months. The site allows users to create “boards” for inspiration and has been furiously adopted by DIY crafters and bloggers.

To get your site set up with a Pinterest button follow the steps here. Please let us know if you have any questions!

Just like our Facebook, bit.ly and Twitter integrations, you do not need to make any changes to start receiving StumbleUpon data. StumbleUpon stats are shown on the Content Detail page of the associated story, which you can find by clicking on any piece on content in your Analytics dashboard or from the Content tab.

If you have any feedback or requests for other 3rd party tracking services you would like to see in the AddThis Analytics, please post in the comments below or email us.

Along with our 5th birthday, AddThis is closing in on another fun milestone: 2 million Twitter followers! We wanted to say thanks to all our supporters today, particularly our Tweeps. We have loved connecting with you in 140 characters or less!

To celebrate, AddThis Analytics’ Twitter Mentions feature is now in real-time! This means anytime a URL from your domain is publicly tweeted, you will be able to see it – RIGHT when it’s been sent. You can find the Twitter Mentions on the Summary tab of your analytics as well as on each content detail page.  See what people are saying on Twitter about your brand or specific content in real-time.

As always, we love hearing your feedback. What is your favorite part of the AddThis Analytics? What other pieces of data would you like to see that will help you understand the social interactions taking place on your site? We’re all ears!

We are constantly updating our service list to make sure that it is easy to share content everywhere online. If there is a service you like to use that is not included in the AddThis menu, please shoot us a note and we’ll do what we can to get it in there!

If you have any questions or concerns, please feel free to email us or post in the comments below.