I was thinking, how go does it really do to have about 15 tiny little buttons at the bottom of my blog posts, pages, etc.??? I certainly do want to get people to use social bookmarks to promote my page, but really, how often would people notice these tiny buttons? How important is the 8th, 9th, or even 12th most popular social bookmarking sites to my blog? I'm guessing not that important... What I was planning to do instead was to pare the field down to maybe two or three services, only the very biggest and best, and use HUGE buttons (or, at least, medium-sized...) to attract more attention to them and to increase the rate that people bookmark my stuff. I was thinking maybe a big "Twitter" bird, maybe a link for StumbleUpon and Digg, and maybe one other service, max. What has been your experience? Has anyone switched between these two strategies, and if so, which one seemed more productive?
IMO, having rows of social icons at the bottom of the post looks desperate. I used to do that, but it really didn't make a big difference...that average user still has no idea what they are. If people have an account on any social bookmarking sites and are active, they really don't need your buttons, they will bookmark your articles if they find them interesting. Of course if your readers are tech saavy, one button that serves all wouldn't be a bad idea. I do think it is important to let readers know of your My Space, Facebook, and Twitter profiles because it isn't assumed that everyone has one.
There are only a few that generate traffic worth having. SU traffic is rubbish. I imagine most bloggers want return readers and fad networking sites are not always the best places to fish for them. I would go with larger icons of the handful of sites that have been proven to send you readers. Also include an "email to a friend button".
I have to say ThreeGuineaWatch has it right. Services that have proven to give you traffic in the past, Twitter (to re-tweet), and E-Mail a friend. I would also go with midsized because as hmansfield says it does look a bit desperate if the full row is listed (moreso if the images are larger than some of your content unless they fully blend with your design.)
Why do you say that SU traffic is rubbish? I mean, I was looking at my analytics account, and one of my sites was getting about as much referral traffic from SU as it was from regular Google searches, which made up nearly all of the traffic. Surely if you're content truly is useful, someone would be bound to convert on something on your site, right?
You tell us...is that SU traffic converting, or is half your traffic "look-e-loo's" who bounce out in 3 seconds?
i agree there is a higher bounce rate with SU, yes there is a lot of visits from SU but they are not returning readers, the people using digg have a similair mentality (at least my experience shows this)
Ive tried lots of small icons ( using wordpress plugin..) and am thinking of changing to a few key larger icons..
Look at my attached image. Organic Google searches have a bounce rate of 68%, while SU is giving me a bounce of about 36%. Looks pretty good to me. (Though the length of visit is shorter, I'll admit that...)
I definitely think you'd be better off choosing a few select buttons, like you said. Use the popular services that you think your readers might have heard of (e.g. Twitter etc). It'll probably be more worthwhile leaving off many of the options, as including them all is just too much.
No idea what the background to those numbers is, or how the analysis package defines bounce rate. But perhaps that tells you a little more about the quality of your content. People actually looking for your subject matter don't stay. However people who have it drip fed to them via toolbar gimmicks perhaps click on more than one page (being habitually click-happy)?
I use the Add This "Share" button at the bottom of my posts. It has ALL the social bookmarks but looks minimalist.
I was thinking the exact same thing - do any readers actually bother to click on the small row "sociable" links on the bottom of a page? As an active SU user if I'm going to bookmark a page I usually do it off the button on my Firefox toolbar as opposed to clicking on a button on the page. I think I'm going to experiment with a few prominent icons, such as digg and delicious and see if that improves anything.
Exactly. I personally have browsed a lot of blogs full of those buttons and never once clicked them. I would, however, click a larger prominent version if they selected one or two.