We never expected to spend as much time as we do building widgets. Increasingly more often, our clients come to us for Twitter stream sidebars, custom Facebook pages and Facebook Like buttons. We’ve known anecdotally that there’s a growing demand for these social media hooks, and now there’s justification.
Lijit, a provider of search, content delivery, and analytics tools for online publishers and networks, has just released a report that reflects how many publishing organizations rely on social tools blended into their sites. Many, many sites have widgets installed, implying that websites are not stand-alone and serve as a hub for more wide-reaching campaigns. Over the past two years, they found:
- 2010: 735,834 sites surveyed, 84.8% with widgets installed (13,541,022 widgets)
- 2009: 744,848 sites surveyed, 84.7% with widgets installed (13,826,562 widgets)
Why the huge numbers?
“To either make their sites better, or to give them more understanding about the readers that visit their site, or to make money,” says Lijit CEO Walter Knapp in an article in EContent Magazine, which featured the study.
The article outlines the wealth of social tools available for augmenting the site and also extracts key date from the study. A helpful benchmark in case you’re deciding whether you want to add a widget to your site.
Check out the top 50.
Top 50 widgets and tools implemented on publisher websites