Does it make sense to place the "Send to a friend" button on a web page?

Question

How often do we see things like “Send this page to a friend” on web pages? Well, I see them quite often.

My question is: how do you guys see efficiency? If I get to a webpage of interest and I think my friend will like it, I can just copy the URL from my browser panel, paste it into the email and click the "Send" button. In my opinion, this is usually faster and fewer errors than a button / link on a web page. In addition, I'm not quite sure what this website does with the emails I entered there - do they store it and then sell it for addresses from 1 to 100 spammers?

My question is: when you create a website, do you place such links on the pages (this is often seen on sites with some news / articles)? Does that even make sense?

Answer 1

The hint button has several uses that are not so obvious.

From the point of view of users: Tell a friend the button to remind the user to tell a friend when they may not have thought about it themselves, which increases referrals. As part of the page, this is much more noticeable.

It also eliminates technical issues, such as knowing how to insert or send a link by email, whether it is possible to configure their local email, being on your own computer with email access, etc.

From the point of view of the webmaster:

Some sites simply send an email. Others can do much more legal and ethical, some not so much.

For the owner of the website, since referrals pass through their server, it allows (if they want it) referrals to track. They can see which pages are being sent, how often and which are most popular.

They can also track other information that allows them to hold contests, potentially see what people are saying about their pages, etc.

They can keep track of the email addresses that marketing data can give them - for example, if they see that many people are sharing with the addresses on aol.com, they may decide to advertise more with aol.

Referrals can also be stimulated, competitions are held, etc.

Answer 2

My mom has no idea how to send the URL to email or chat, but she often uses "send it to freind".

Answer 3

No. I personally do not put this on my pages, but for less experienced users, I think this button would help a lot. Many people do not correlate between the URL in the address bar and the page being viewed. I know that my mother is not for years.

Answer 4

I put it there as a customer request, I also distribute a free module that performs the function of "Tell-A-Friend" for DotnetNuke installations, which is quite popular.

As others note, it really depends on the target audience, more experienced users who will understand the technology are just going to copy and paste, less tech approaches can find a much more practical use of the “telling friend” style module.

Answer 5

I used these buttons when I'm not sure which bits of the long URL are part of the minimum minimum that my friend needs to get on the page, and which bits are the data associated with my session on the site.

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

As others noted, non-technical people may not understand what a URL is, but the “Send this to a Friend” button is easy for everyone to understand.

Answer 6

Features like Tell-A-Friend also allow you to capture traffic statistics that you might miss. If you rely completely on people to copy and paste URLs into email, you don’t have a good way to tell how often this happens. If you create a form that sends a message (s), you can count how many people sent how many messages.

Like any web traffic metric, this error is erroneous, but it can give you an order for this behavior and a way to compare how two different pieces of content are produced.