Last week we started investigating sharing methods for events on events.wayne.edu (opens new window). When we initially launched the university events calendar (opens new window) we wanted to make sure events were easy to find and share. After the launch we saw an upswing in the number of events being added and the traffic to the site. We were happy so we continued advocating and pushing the functionality on the campus community. Now, a year later, our goals have changed. Our calendar has an abundance of events and it’s time to share them with the world.

AddThis Plugin

We started playing around with the Facebook Open Graph (opens new window) plugin this week and it sparked our interest in how people were sharing events. We initially put the AddThis (opens new window) plugin in the right column of each event with the most popular options at the time for sharing. Looking at the analytics we were surprised with some of the results.

1. E-mail is still king

There has been a lot of talk the last few days about e-mail being dead (opens new window) but we are seeing 37 percent of all event shares being sent out through e-mail. Another interesting note is that e-mail is not the first item on the share list, it's actually the last item in the first column which makes it a little harder to notice.

2. Facebook and Open Graph

We assumed Facebook would be at the top of the list for shares but it wasn't. It still pulled in a respectable 24 percent of all event shares, however. To us this has more impact than email because Facebook shares are a one-to-many relationship. They allow for a snowball effect, allowing friends and extended friends to comment and like shares which extend the reach exponentially.

Last week we also added the Open Graph plugin to the right hand column of event pages. It's still too early to report on the analytics but we are seeing a spike in usage already and will report on this later. I will tell you that Open Graph is far more powerful than we imagined.

3. CTRL-P

To our surprise printing was in the top three share options for AddThis. 12 percent of people click on the "Print" link within the plugin to keep or share a hard copy of an event. This peeked our interest because it isn't doing anything special other than File->Print in your browser. What it did was give us the opportunity to double check our print style sheet to make sure we were maximizing the page content. We did fix a few things after our investigation.

Beyond Events

We have the AddThis plugin installed on pages throughout the Wayne State website and are gathering statistics from these areas also but they were not taken into account in this blog post. The users for the event calendar are different than other areas on campus and we treat their needs differently. We are going to continue to monitor share usage throughout the entire website and hope to offer visitors the most effective sharing options to continue to spread the great things going on at Wayne State.