Just How Many Sharing Options Does Mashable Have?

We all know that sharing links is the new currency on the web and brands are starting to spend more resources on social media as it can be a great traffic driver but when does sharing just get too much. How often do you actually use the buttons on sites to share the story? I personally rely on the copy and paste method but we wanted to take a look at one popular blog…Mashable and see just how many sharing options there are, here is a screen grab of a regular post to analyze, you will be surprised…

Retweet Button

The Retweet button is one of the most popular buttons from around the web and is becoming a standard on pages all over the web not long after launching. The button allows you to click it and it will populate the link and short description into your twitter account ready to tweet. The other bonus of the button is that it shows how many retweets your story has giving it some automatic credibility.

Share On Facebook

The share on Facebook button has gained some popularity in recent months and starting popping up all over the place as blogs and publications see the importance of Facebook as a traffic driver. Facebook is moving more towards providing a constant stream of information with their news feed, status updates and various other measures they have introduced to combat Twitter. Once the story is on Facebook the potential for it to spread between users increases significantly.

Drag To Share

This fairly new feature from Meebo allows you to drag the photo and once you start dragging you are presented with four options….Share by Twitter (again), Facebook (again), Email or IM. You drop the link into the relevant box and it populates the link into the service you requested. The system is fairly easy to use after the first time you try it and the beauty of it is that it is fairly unobtrusive in that you will only be presented with the options as soon as you hover over the design and it doesn’t really mess with the overall design of the page.

Subscribe Options

Although we all know how to get the Twitter feed and RSS options you can still be sure that most sites will show them off on their page in a prominent position. Mashable do that in prime real estate in their sidebar offering readers the chance to follow them on Twitter, Facebook, RSS and email subscription. There is no chance that you are going to be reading this particular blog and not be able to find a way of getting their content pushed to you in the future!

Follow The Author

Every single author on Mashable has a clickable profile image that once clicked allows you to see the personal profiles on Twitter, linkedin, Facebook and all their other posts to date. This is a great way of building the profile of the people writing on the site as there is likely to be plenty of interaction with the readers and the authors will more often than not tweet out their own stories also so the more people seeing their profiles the better.

Click To Share

As if there weren’t enough options already there is a little button on the bottom left hand corner of every page that when clicked opens up all the same options as described in the dragging the image option above.

Toolbar

The Meebo toolbar is used so as you can interact with users on Facebook and through chat. The main aim of this is so as you start chatting from within the Mashable site with the hope that you go on to share links etc through IM and facebook.

All in all you can see that there are tons of different ways to share the content that you are reading and there is literally only a tiny bit of room for the actual text content. Are there too many sharing options? Do people even use these tools to share and when does the sharing just get too much?