"Email this page to a friend" Feature

Is this feature worth creating?

[expat123]

For those of you who have implemented the "Email this page to a friend" feature on their web site, can you tell me if visitors actually use it and if it seems to increase awareness of your web site.

I would like to know if it is worthwhile implementing such a feature.

[thaedge]

I have it on one site on just about every page. It contains mucho humor and things that I personally would laugh and and send a link too.

Cant give you #s as to how many use it, but in logs I see many links to aol, yahoo, and earthlink mail.

[abbeyvet]

I use it on one site in particular where it is used a lot and is very worthwhile. I get a copy of each message sent - several a day, after a newsletter goes out it peaks to up to maybe 2 or 3 dozen pointing out specific new articles.

It's a membership site and often within a very short time the recipient joins up via free membership and thus to the Newsletter mailing list. Occasionally when a specific product is recommended and the recipient buys within a short time - I don't really monitor it closely enough to know of others buy or join after a longer period.

There is a facility for people to add a short message when sending to a friend and they can be useful reading - pointing out things people particularly, a sort of very non-scientific feedback from users.

[buckworks]

I have a Tell-A-Friend link on a couple of content/reference sites ( ~1500 pages), and I find that one in maybe 500-1000 visitors will use the feature. Percentage-wise that's small, but any traffic coming from that will be well-targeted and free, so what's not to like?

FWIW, I really like the features of the free CGI referral script from BigNoseBird.com. It takes some tweaking to set it up but it has almost no effect on page load time, unlike some remotely hosted TAF's I've seen.

[martinibuster]

I use a free script called blue send (or maybe bluesend). You link out to an external JS so it doesn't weigh down the page, and put a little graphic on the side.

I find that .5 to 2% of my traffic uses it. I edited the script so that it writes to a flat file db, as well as send me notification. People seem to be sending articles to their moms and friends.

It's word of mouth- possibly the best endorsement you can get.