Social Media "share This" Buttons, - Are they really necessary? Options

[Urban Kudos]

Hi there,

I'm sure most visitors here would have visited many blogs and social sites, and many would of also noticed social media buttons encouraging you to: Digg this (Digg), Burn that(Feedburner), Seed link (Newsvine), Fav me (Technorati) etc etc...

Those little buttons can come in all shapes and sizes, and in a variety of colours all aimed at attracting you attention and getting to you virally promote that page.

I've always been quite fascinated with the impact of the social "Share this" buttons and in my view, they are just a waste of space. For most of the genuinely popular blog's I've ever visited, very few carry a battery of viral buttons.

In terms of SEO, they also dissipate your page strength by providing one-way links out of your page to the same external URL's page after page.

My question is are these little buttons actually necessary? Does anyone have any evidence that these buttons are beneficial to Social Media Optimisation or would you agree with me that they are just a load of gimmicks to promote the social networks themselves.

Thanks!

[chrishirst]

In terms of SEO, they also dissipate your page strength by providing one-way links out of your page to the same external URL's page after page.

Nope.



or an alternative view could be that we don't give a monkey's either way, or is that just me?

[Jill]

Aren't they usually some sort of javascript function and not a link somewhere?

[qwerty]

They're links to submit information to forms, so they're not going to be of interest to search engines. For example

HTML

<a href="http://del.icio.us/post?url=<$BlogItemPermalinkURL$>&title=<$BlogItemTitle$>" title="Bookmark to del.icio.us"><img src="delicious.png" alt="del.icio.us" width="16" height="16" /></a>

That's not going to be viewed as a link to del.icio.us.

[jehochman]

The search engines see these buttons everywhere. If I ran a search engine, I'd make a list of these, and just disregard them for the purpose of computing link popularity. These links aren't votes.

[Urban Kudos]

They're links to submit information to forms, so they're not going to be of interest to search engines. For example

HTML

<a href="http://del.icio.us/post?url=<$BlogItemPermalinkURL{:content:}gt;&title=<$BlogItemTitle{:content:}gt;" title="Bookmark to del.icio.us"><img src="delicious.png" alt="del.icio.us" width="16" height="16" /></a>

That's not going to be viewed as a link to del.icio.us.

Thats true. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/searchme.gif)

My question is are these little buttons actually necessary? Does anyone have any evidence that these buttons are beneficial to Social Media Optimisation or would you agree with me that they are just a load of gimmicks to promote the social networks themselves.

Thanks!

However, does anyone have any views regarding the need for these buttons? Do they actually help promote the page or will users Digg, Stumble, Share any content they like natrually regardless if there is a set up buttons there or not?

[Nueromancer]

Thats true. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/searchme.gif)
However, does anyone have any views regarding the need for these buttons? Do they actually help promote the page or will users Digg, Stumble, Share any content they like natrually regardless if there is a set up buttons there or not?

Its just a way of encorageing people to vote on your story at sites like digg by makeing it esier to digg a story it alos stops dupes of stories and vote spliting.

[tamar]

There was a big discussion about this a few months back. 37Signals said that the top blogs don't have these buttons. I said that new blogs can use the social media boost: www.techipedia.com/2006/11/01/new-blogs-can-use-social-bookmarking-a-rebuttal-against-37signals/.

So it goes back to to your original idea, Urban Kudos - popular blogs don't need these buttons because they already have the popularity. But newer blogs can definitely benefit from a boost if their content is promoted via these links. If these buttons are placed in front of the user, the user might be compelled to take advantage of them. That's especially the case for the big Digg buttons that you see on many blog posts (even popular blogs).

For my personal blog, which is also relatively new, I started off with only a few links. I then removed them after time.

Even if you do utilize these tools, I wouldn't overdo it, though.

Reason for edit: removed live link

[qwerty]

Even if you do utilize these tools, I wouldn't overdo it, though.

I think that's probably the most important point about this. You could probably stick 30 or 40 buttons at the end of every post on your blog, but that's just beyond overkill. The idea should be to put it in people's minds to share your content, and to make it easy for them to do so.

I think the best strategy is to think about your readers and which of the bookmarking services they're likely to use, then provide posting buttons for no more than four of them. I don't personally see a reason to remove the links as long as you haven't been overdoing it, though. I don't think there's anything wrong with providing them as a convenience, and I doubt seeing a few of them on a blog someone already likes is likely to make them feel like they're being harangued.

[torka]

If you're using WordPress, there's always the Share This plugin. It puts a single "Share this" button at the bottom of the post. Clicking on that button opens up a new page that allows the visitor to Digg, favoritize at Technorati, bookmark at del.icio.us, etc. and incorporates an "email this to a friend" form, so pretty much no matter how a visitor might want to "share this" post they can. But there's only one relatively non-obnoxious button (which you can change via CSS if you don't like the default) on the actual blog post. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/goodjob.gif)

--Torka (IMG:style_emoticons/default/mf_prop.gif)

[Jill]

Thanks Torka, that had to be the easiest plug-in in history to install! (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

[Justin Goldberg]

There's also js based addthis and ekstreme, which need no server side code, it's all handled on their sites end.

I don't see many sites with a ctrl-d to bookmark this or click this link to bookmark anymore, it's sad.

Google shows 2.5 million results for 'add to delicious|magnolia|ma.gnolia' and 1.8 million for 'ctrl-d|ctrld bookmark|favorite'


This post has been edited by torka: Jul 17 2007, 11:21 AM

Reason for edit: removed font change

[tamar]

I don't see many sites with a ctrl-d to bookmark this or click this link to bookmark anymore, it's sad.

I'm kind of happy about that. My Bookmarks list is HUGE, and I rarely organize it. I think you're watching an evolution, really.

[qwerty]

I think it's just a different animal. The bookmarks I keep on my PC are for pages I believe I'll have reason to access every now and then. The bookmarks I've got on del.icio.us are intended for other things: I bookmark articles I find to be of interest in case I want to cite them later, and as a collection, they're kind of my linking identity. That is, people who find that they're interested in the sort of pages I tend to bookmark may decide to follow my advice just because it comes from me, contact me, recommend things to me, etc.

The del.icio.us extension for Firefox allows you to add bookmarks to your local list and your del.icio.us bookmarks at the same time automatically, and I keep that option turned off.