another mini-tutorial / set of tips I posted on my blog that I thought would be useful. if you have questions, comments, advice, etc, let me know. -- randfish recently responded to a post on Signal vs. Noise about social bookmarking icons. Or, more accurately, he responded to a post about why you shouldn’t be using them. Matt from Signal v. Noise argues that it’s the content, not the icons that will result in true social bookmarking. He’s both right and wrong, really: outstanding content is far more important but in reality, "reminding" a user to consider helping pass the link along via digg or del.icio.us can make a tremendous difference. This was the stance randfish took, and rightly so. But there’s something even randfish missed out on. There’s a right way and a wrong way to go about adding those links; this is something he realizes, whether subconciously or not. After finishing this post, check out his blog and you’ll see what I mean. If you’re going to do "social bookmark begging" (or perhaps "requesting" if you want to be ultra-white-hat PC), you need to do it right. Social bookmarking icons result in the same phenomenon as banner blindness. They’re everywhere, users that frequently visit the blogs begin to automatically ignore them. Standard social bookmarking icons layout are something you should run from. As any internet marketer should know, in the vast majority of cases, text works better than images. It’s harder to become blind to text ads. If you are going to use image icons, do not use the standard ones, and try to use text to compliment it. Avoid this. Avoid this even more. As Matt on Signal v. Noise did, I looked at the current front page digg stories. Three had "digg this" style calls to action. The marketwatch story used text and the standard icons. SoftwareByRob’s article did the same. Desktop Linux did it best. Not that there isn’t room for improvement, even on the Desktop Linux story. I once noticed ShoeMoney’s Blog Digg strategies. They’re better than most sites out there. Curiously, his site was down today. When it came back up, the Digg links were completely removed. Was he doing things so well he was getting too much traffic? Social bookmarking done right cheat-sheet: * Don’t use the ubiquitous copy-cutter icons; bloggers are blind to them. * Make new icons, if you want to use images. * Don’t link to every social bookmarking site out there. Link to the most important ones. Link to as few as possible; fewer options means less clutter means higher conversions. * If you want to use icons, use text along with them. * Use text. Use text instead of the icons when possible. * Find the right text. Treat the text as a call to action. Pretend this is adwords for a second; how can you get your target audience to convert? * An extension of the above: give the reasons a user to visit the pages. If there’s a discussion on digg about your article, mention it! Conversion is not a one step process. When you want your user to do something, you need to identify the steps involved. With social bookmarking it involves the following: create content the user feels is worth passing along, try to route them to the appropriate destination, and try to encourage them to click once they get there. Everytime you want a user to do something, you need to stop and think about how best to accomplish that. It’s astounding how many marketers manage to forget to apply all the fundamentals they (hopefully) already know. --
figured someone would ask about that ;-) it's a new blog. haven't had time to implement digg / etc the way I want, and I have to move to a better server before I risk letting anything get too popular.
as I mentioned, shoemoney's blog used to be a rather good example. there were a few "okay" examples that I mentioned too. check back to my blog in a few weeks and I'll likely have my system implemented, if you want to check it out then.
good advice, as everything else social bookmarking icons should not interfere with the user experience would you exchange a happy visitor for a couple of diggs? I do not think so
glad people are actually liking it. wasn't really sure how well it'd go over as it's a pretty crowded area.
1) Do you suggest that we get customed icons? Eg1. having the word "digg" beside the digg icon, rather than just the default digg icon without wording at the side Eg2. having the word "email a friend" beside the email icon, rather than just the default email icon without wording at the side 2) Should we change the word "enjoy & share" to something different? Maybe "Great Post! Share It!" or some other call to action. 3) Would that help to get more people to bookmark my posts?
as with all conversion tracking, the only way to tell for sure is to test. try different things out. some may work better than others. I do know, however, that adding a string of a dozen random icons at the end does not do much at all. words by the icons help but I'd personally take it a step further... again, if you want to see my personal take on it, check things out again when I add them to the blog I can bump the topic when I do if people want
plain text works better than ads in the far majority of situations. make a script that's designed to add "There's a discussion about this post on Digg now, check it out." with a link at the top of the page. at the bottom use standard text instead of buttons. "liked this post? add it to digg or delicious." each one with an appropriate link. all sorts of things like that work.
It's simple: 1) http://push.cx/sociable (go download the plugin) 2) upload it on your wordpress plugin folder 3) activate it 4) play around with the settings, it's quite simple That's all