Does it make sense to put a "Send it to a friend" button on a webpage?

Question

Hey,

How often do we see stuff like "Send this page to a friend" on a webpages? Well, I see them quite often.

My question is, how do you guys see it's effectiveness? If I hit a webpage that's interesting, and I think my friend would enjoy it, I can just copy the URL from my browser bar, paste it into the email and press "Send" button. In my opinion, it's usually faster and less mistake-aware then the button/link like this on the webpage. In addition, I'm not really sure what this website does with the emails I enter there - don't they store it and then sell for $1/100 addresses to spammers?

My question is - when you design a website, do you put such links on the pages (it's often seen on sites with some news/articles)? Does it even make sense?

Answer 1

No I don't personally put that on my pages, but for less tech savvy users I imagine this button would help a lot. A lot of people don't make the correlation between the URL in the address bar and the page they are viewing. I know my mother didn't for years.

Answer 2

My mom has no idea how to send a URL in email or IM, but she does use "send it to a freind" buttons quite often.

Answer 3

I put it in there as clients request, I also distribute a free module that does "Tell-A-Friend" functionality for DotnetNuke installations, it is quite popular.

As others have pointed out it really depends on the target audience, more tech savvy users are just going to copy and paste, the less tech savvy are going to find much more practical use of a "tell-a-friend" style module.

Answer 4

I've used those buttons for when I'm not sure which bits of a long URL are part of the bare minimum needed for my friend to get to the page and which bits are data related to my session on the site.

Having said that, when I've used them I've sent them to myself, and copied and pasted the URL from the email I've received!

As others have noted, non-technical people may not understand what the URL is, but a 'Send this to a friend' button is easily understood by all.

Answer 5

Tell-A-Friend type functions also offer a chance to capture traffic stats you might otherwise miss. If you rely totally on people copy-and-pasting the URLs into email, you have no good way to tell how often this happens. If you build a form that sends the message(s) you can count how many people sent how many messages.

Like any web traffic metric this one is flawed, but it can give you an order of magnitude for this behavior, and a way to compare how two different pieces of content of being received.

Answer 6

The tell-a-friend button has a number of uses that are not so obvious.

From the users perspective: A tell a friend button will remind a user to tell a friend when they may not have thought of it themselves, which increases referrals. As part of the page, it's much more noticeable.

It also removes technical questions like knowing how to paste or email the link, having their local email set up properly, being on their own computer with email access, etc.

From the webmaster perspective:

Some sites just send the email. Others can do a lot more some legal and ethical, some not so much.

For the owner of the website, since the referrals go through their server, it allows (if they so choose) referrals to be tracked. They can see what pages are being sent, how often, and which are most popular.

They might also track other info, which lets them run contests, potentially see what people are saying about their pages, etc.

They may track email addresses, which could give them marketing data - for instance if they see that a lot of people are sharing that have addresses at aol.com, they may decide to advertise more with aol.

Referrals can also be incentivised, contests run, etc.

Answer 7

I think this is great for users who are not that familiar with URLs and Copy/Paste. From a developing country's perspective, the "Tell a friend" button and other burned out strategies from the past are quite efective in populations that are only now becoming internet users. And keep in mind, the "Rest of the world" is only now becoming internet friendly. (Dont know if that is a good thing).