Follow Us widgets: How to get them and what to look for?

[jpo3136b]

<p>You've seen those little blocks on web pages that say "Follow us on" [whatever social media website]?</p>

<p>On this very page, I see one of those types of code blocks, up above the question.</p>

<p>Who builds those? I assume from their unified appearance that they have some sort of standardized parameters, probably a unified authorship.</p>

<p>What's the best way to get them? My last search for some info on those returned 39 million potential answers.</p>

<p>I assume that whoever builds them will also be interested in collecting on the people who use them. With that in mind, what should I look for in one of these? Like, does installing one of these feed a lot of free info into some marketing company? If so, how would that be to my advantage or disadvantage? Any experience or insight with this? Thanks.</p>

<p>If there's a good way to narrow the search terms down to less than 39 million, that'd be helpful, too. Much obliged. J.</p>

[Matt Laur]

<p>These all tie back to those other web sites (Twitter, Facebook, etc). Once you've set up your accounts within those systems, you'll see tools there that generate the link code.</p>

[photomark]

Like Matt said, it's not hard to build any of these by visiting the various sites and getting the format for the links and a logo.

For example, Facebook has a tool for building widgets here: http://www.facebook.com/facebook-widgets/

 

Since the links go back to the site in question, I would think the only place to which you are feeding information is the site

itself.

 

ShareThis ( http://sharethis.com ) has a widget that aggregates a bunch of widgets in one convenient, easy-to-use piece of

javascript. I see it in quite a few places. I'm not sure what kind of data they are gathering, but

since you are pulling resources from their servers they probably get a pretty good amount of data on the traffic into your

site. I think that's pretty innocuous, but I suppose reasonable opinions could vary.

[yusav_gherigson]

If you are using WordPress as a blog for your site, you can install the ShareThis plugin, otherwise the best

bet would be to use the ShareThis website listed by Mark M. If you just want a "follow us on whatever"

badge you should be able to download one from the website, like twitter, or find one somewhere else, and

make it an html link that points to your account on that website, like <a

href='http://twitter.com/john'>Follow us on Twitter</a> or whatever.