It’s getting to be that time of year when it’s time to start planning your holiday travel. And this week, we’re here to help you not procrastinate! CheapFlights.com isn’t just for plane tickets – they have hotel listings, travel tips and all sorts of great resources for planning your voyage. But hey, we were all ears at the “cheap flights” part too.

CheapFlights knows the importance of social and is using a version of our vertical scrolling sharebar. This sharebar is great for any site that is looking to implement social buttons in an optimal place for sharing, but without getting in the way of any other design or UI factors that might be more important for conversions.

Look at those numbers!

Another great AddThis feature that CheapFlights is employing are our Follow buttons:

Just as we recommend, CheapFlights has these buttons enabled across their site so users who are clicking around, or who might enter on a random page via search, won’t miss their chance to fan or follow the brand. In our AddThis analytics we give you insight into what pages are garnering these clicks to your external channels.

The AddThis Follow buttons are not limited to the ones you see above – we also support YouTube, LinkedIn, Instagram and more.

 

Want to see more great AddThis implementations? See all of our past Site of the Week candidates and check back every week for more great highlights.

In this edition of Site of the Week, looking for tips on how to track small purchases (that always add up to larger dollar signs)? How about some pointers on how to financially plan for that family vacation? Enter the HelloWallet blog!

HelloWallet is a friendly, digital financial service for individuals to help them manage their money. They also deliver financial advice using a technology-based model. We love them for a variety of reasons, but think it’s worth calling out that they have a SMILE in their logo. How can you not appreciate a service that looks to make finances fun?

The HelloWallet blog isn’t just a place for company news, but where the team dishes out some high level tips and tricks for being financially responsible. We’re not talking boring, ol’ “don’t spend more than you make” type of topics, but fun articles like “The True Cost of a Twinkie”. And those are the articles always worth sharing! So let’s take a look at how they are using AddThis:

On the blog main page, next to each article preview, HelloWallet has a custom share button with the new sharing menu on hover, along with our Facebook Like, Twitter tweet and LinkedIn 3rd party buttons. This gives regular readers a quicker share option to all their preferred destinations.

On each article page, they again use 3rd party buttons and our native AddThis share counter for the full service menu. The buttons are prominent and near the title, always a good practice for increasing social numbers.

Finally, HelloWallet is also using our Address Bar Sharing feature. AB Sharing allows them to track the articles that are being shared by using the good old fashioned copy and paste method. It is still the most common way to share today and the best mechanism for having insight into all social sharing.

Now excuse us because we’re feeling inspired to go clip coupons and be financially savvy! Thank you, HelloWallet!

If you have any questions about any of the HelloWallet AddThis implementations, please let us know.

It’s Friday, you are antsy for the weekend and possibly looking for the occasional distraction. So for today’s AddThis Site of the Week, we decided to help you with that.

E Book Browse is a website that allows you to search for books and documents that are available online. If we were still in college, we’d totally be using this site to help us write our paper at 2am the morning it’s due.

E Book Browse also uses AddThis for their sharing tools. Fancy that!

The implementation covers two basic and important best practices that we like to preach:

• Make your sharing buttons discoverable.
• Present each individual user with the services they prefer.

As you can see in the screenshot, E Book Browse has their share buttons prominently placed next to the most important content on the page – the book! There are tabs displaying 4 share services and the AddThis + symbol, which opens our menu on hover.

As for providing a more custom experience for each user, they are using our “preferred services” feature. We display services based on individuals’ past sharing history, as well as what is most popular across our network based on geographic data. It is designed to make it easy for users to share to their preferred destinations and to increase sharing.

We think Barry (the “author” of The Playbook) approves of that.

In our second installment of Site of the Week, we decided to highlight a site that covers something we don’t take lightly around the AddThis offices … food. They take this topic very seriously too, which is why their site is so aptly named: SeriousEats.com.

Serious Eats covers all sorts of food – upscale, downhome, exotic, and simple. Doesn’t matter, as long as it’s delicious! We can certainly get on-board with that.

Of course, one of the great things about food is being able to SHARE it. Whether it’s ordering a meal family style or pinning that drool-worthy photo of a grilled cheese to your Pinterest board. Fortunately, Serious Eats has a great sharing implementation to make it simple to share to their favorite social destinations. (As for literal sharing, that’s up to you, but we expect an invitation!) ;)

The food site is using a vertical sharing bar with our 3rd party native service buttons, which scrolls with the user as they move down the page. Go ahead and see for yourself! It’s like a trusty sidekick, never leaving you and waiting for just the right moment when you are ready to send to your networks!

 

Then, if you want to share a specific picture from their hunger-inducing photo galleries, they have additional buttons on each slide to help you with that too. While not currently in place on Serious Eats, another recommendation for our publishers who employ photo galleries is our photo sharing toolbox.

We can’t recommend enough that you visit and bookmark this seriously delicious site.

Now, excuse us while we go raid the fridge!

If you would like to submit a site for this blog feature, please send us a note. To get more information on criteria, check out our first installment.

Introducing a new weekly blog feature! We’re always talking about the size and scale of our 14M domain network because we’re proud and humbled to be connected with so many of you and the great work you’re doing. We are inspired by all the different ways publishers and site owners customize our tools to create beautiful and unique web experiences for their users. It’s about time we start highlighting some of the standout integrations of our tools. So, welcome to the very first AddThis Site of the Week!

Letters of Note is a blog that gathers interesting notes, postcards, memos and other forms of correspondence from time periods throughout history.  We appreciate the simplicity of their design because it lets the content stand on its own.

Letters of Note uses the new AddThis sharing menus to create a streamlined experience for users to share the amazing and often inspirational content. We love how the button blends into the site unobtrusively, suggesting that users share with what feels like a gentle nudge. It feels almost like you should share because it blends so well with the user flow. Maybe we’re biased, but we love the orange! Then, once the user shows interest in sharing by mousing over or committing to a share by clicking, the full menu puts an array of custom options at their fingertips.

Initial results show that the new menu increases sharing by 11% across brands and, since our launch, the expanded menu has seen a 4x lift in shares.

We look forward to featuring more of the amazing sites that use the AddThis tools and hope that by doing so, we will promote creative ideas as well as highlight some best practices for using our tools.

If you ever want to submit a site for AddThis Site of the Week, please feel free to shoot us an email.