Website sharing buttons – which, and how to use?

You will no doubt have noticed whilst browsing the internet that many sites have website sharing buttons on them for all of the most popular social media and social bookmarking websites.

These buttons are most evident on video sharing websites, but really any website or blog should employ these sharing buttons on them as they are a really good way of allowing more people to find out about the content on the site.

Again, as with my last post about having a button or text link to encourage users to add your site to their favourites list, urging people to share your content by having such website sharing buttons on your page is the best way to guarantee most will do so.

Although many people will be able to share your site without the buttons being available directly on the webpage, we must not forget that there are still lots of others that are not used to using sharing services online, and these people will need all the help they can get to share any useful information they find.

That is why you should not only offer them a full list of sharing buttons for all of the most popular social media and social bookmarking websites out there, but you should also state why these sharing buttons are even on your webpage to start with!

A line like “Let the whole world know what you have found” just above the set of sharing buttons will make them feel like they are really helping others with what they are about to do – which is spread word about your site.

The internet seems to be moving away from actual links from websites being the most important ranking factor in the search engine results, towards mentions from users own social media and social bookmarking accounts being of most importance (although of course you should never stop trying to get more links to your website!)

Some people might not even have used the sharing buttons available from there own social media and social bookmarking services before – indeed they might have only just registered for an account with that service.

For that reason it might well be worth going into even more detail alongside the sharing buttons list on your website letting them know the process of what they must do to post their sharing message. (Even if that is something as simple as saying “Login and hit post!”)

I have not yet split tested with my chosen sharing service (mentioned below) whether or not I get more shares from the pages with extra help on them, it is just my opinion that extra help for users is probably not a bad thing.

There are several services out there that provide you with a simple bit of customizable code that you can place on your website or blog to create website sharing buttons your visitors can use.

I am currently using the button code provided by http://sharethis.com/ as this service provided me with all of the buttons I wanted for my chosen list of social media and social bookmarking services in the way that I liked them, although there are two other very popular services I would like to mention below.

http://www.addthis.com/

www.addtoany.com/ (Now goes straight to http://share.lockerz.com)

You should be able to use any of these website sharing services quite easily as the process of creating buttons is as simple as sign up for free and select sharing services and buttons style, then copy and paste code into website or blog.

Let me know how you get on!

Tags: Website sharing buttons