Buttons, Buttons, Everywhere – Site Owner, Beware!

Placing social media buttons all over blogs and web sites has been a hot
trend. Webmasters feel that adding these small buttons to their website will
increase their social traffic. In some cases this is true, but in most it is
not.

If you look at the article below, there are two social media buttons within
the red box that I’ve highlighted:

Let’s zoom in:

The first button is for Del.icio.us, and
the second is for Digg. You would think that
people click on these buttons, which might cause the article to appear on the
Del.icio.us popular page and the Digg homepage. This article was good and had
the potential to do well on social sites. However, it didn’t get popular on
either of those sites. Instead, it ranked on a third social media site —
Reddit:

Why did this story do well on Reddit despite the fact that a button for
Reddit was not placed on the article? Here are the two main reasons:

First, most people place these social media buttons on every page of their
site, which causes them to become common and blend into the design. If this is
how you place them, no one is going to click on them, which will just cause
these social media buttons to potentially take up valuable website real estate.

Second, you are scattering your visitors to sites that they are probably not
familiar with. Even in the technology industry, there are millions of people who
don’t know what Digg or Del.icio.us are. The way these sites work is that the
more votes you get, the higher your chances are of getting on the homepage. By
giving your visitors multiple options, you might decrease your votes on each
individual social media site, thus decreasing your chances of getting on the
homepage.

For an SEO analogy, think how many people have learned that it’s often better
to try and build links to one particular page, for a particular topic, rather
than to several of them. Just as you want to concentrate your link love, so you
want to concentrate your vote love.

Due to this, I don’t recommend placing all of these small social media
buttons your website. If you have content that is potentially worthy of social
media sites, pick the site (and its audience) that it is most suited to your
article and place a big social media button just for that one website. Another
option is to specifically tell your readers to vote for your story on that
particular social media site, right within the story or content you’ve created.

Whatever route you decide to take, just make sure you do not overdo it. If
you constantly ask for votes, your readers will get used to your solicitation
and begin to ignore it.

Neil Patel is
co-founder and CTO of ACS and writes
regularly on social media issues through the company’s blog,
Pronet Advertising. The
Let’s
Get Social column appears Tuesdays at
Search Engine Land.