How to Increase Readership via Sharing Buttons

Sharing-buttons

.
Originally I wanted to start this blog post, mentioning hundreds of websites I visited just last week, which did not have any sharing buttons.  And how difficult it makes it for the reader to share information about news and events in publishing, such as publishing conferences, writing contest deadlines, freelance offers etc., or book reviewer pages.  Even major international book fairs were missing out on these valuable tools. But it gets worse:

Browsing the Internet for the latest social sharing button offers, I discovered an article at Solostream.com: “Social Sharing Buttons For Your WordPress blog”.  This article did NOT contain a single sharing button on their own blog, despite the introduction sentence for this post: “Social sharing buttons are a must for a blog nowadays. There are multiple plugins for …”
.

Benefits of Social Sharing Buttons.
In order to generate free advertising, social sharing buttons are one of the best ways to spread the word via a variety of social media channels.  Social shares are important for driving traffic to your website or blog.  The impact of getting shares from influencers on social media networks will have positive effects on a website.
.
More is Not Always Better.
Each social sharing button uses a piece of JavaScript code to connect forth and back between the social network’s servers and your site – which can slow site load-times of your site. The only real way to test their impact is to A/B test pages with and without social media sharing buttons, and make a decision based on the evidence. A/B testing is a way to compare two versions of a single variable typically by testing a subject’s response to variable A against variable B, and determining which of the two variables is more effective.
.
Select the Right Social Networks.
There are two ways you can be sure to select the social networks that matter most to your site. First, you can check out where your readers are already sharing your content and then on which social media site you have the most followers.
Limit the number of social media buttons. Three, maximal four social sharing buttons (Google+, Twitter and Facebook) are enough. Make them small, maybe even grey/blue to not distract readers from your content or your message.
.
Where to Place the Sharing Buttons?
It’s not enough that your buttons look good, or that they are just present somewhere on your pages. They need to be placed where they’re going to catch your reader’s attention and make it easy for them to share your content with their followers.
Placing social buttons to the left of the blog post makes sense, as readers follow text left to right. A growing trend is to place shareable content inline with the rest of your content, for example these “click-to-tweet” plug-ins.
.
No matter where you place the buttons: they should be in close proximity to the content being shared. According to a Nielson eyetracking visualizations study, online visitors in the Western world are mostly reading Web pages in an F-shaped pattern: two horizontal stripes followed by a vertical stripe.  The top left portion is the most-viewed part of the web page, which supports the idea that left and top are best choices for social share buttons (beside an image of your latest book, I might add).
.
Remember: “Design is not just about how it looks. It goes much deeper than that. It’s how it works
~ Steve Jobs

.
Some Facts About Social Media Sharing Sites.
While Facebook has the most users, it is not the best site for SEO, which is GooglePlus, which feeds posts automatically into their search engines.  They don’t need to be “found” by web crawlers, as they are immediately pinged to Google.  A Google sharing button is a must-have component of your social media button set.
.
A Twitter button is also a must-have, as the nature of  Twitter itself is content sharing. Including this button on your blog, in combination with participating in the conversation, will drive more traffic to your posts.
.
If your blog or website has an image to each article, or videos, place a Pinterest button.  The site is popular among readers who consume lifestyle content.  Think entertainment, books (especially romance, as the majority of Pinterest users are women), recipes, interior design, fashion etc.
.
Reading and Sharing.
Hopefully you have already linked your own Twitter page(s) with Google+ and LinkedIn. In order to save time, share the content you found on the internet and let other users and followers know about it with LinkedIn and Google+.  No need to tweet it, it will appear on Twitter automatically – if your Twitter account is connected with those sites!
.
Find Links, Images, Descriptions and even Reviews of Sharing Buttons in these web articles:

http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/3817-Top-10-Social-Sharing-Buttons-for-Your-Website

http://www.solostream.com/blog/social-sharing-buttons-for-your-wordpress-blog/

 

<><><><><>

 

Social tagging: > > > > > >