First there were trackbacks, then came bookmarking chicklets, and now Tweetbacks and retweet buttons! Aren’t we going overboard?
What I fail to understand is why will anyone share your content? Unless you write VERY well all the time, there is no reason to believe that someone will share your post on a different platform. I firmly believe that the onus of sharing your content lies squarely on your shoulders. While you should tweet, digg, bookmark and share your content, don’t expect others to do so for you, because honestly, no one will.
Another thing I have noticed is the bookmarklets themselves. People tend to go overboard with these bookmarking chicklets.
The above is an actual screenshot taken a very popular website. Do we REALLY need so many sharing options? I’d also like some science behind this, for instance:
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How many bookmarklets should one ideally have?
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What order should they be placed in?
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Is it better to have the icons placed inside the ShareThis button or outside individually?
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What about click-rates on the buttons themselves to check if anyone’s actually clicking on them or not?
The other thing that I believe is that those who regularly share content on Digg, Delicious, Google Reader, etc. already have those bookmarklets on their browser toolbars and don’t normally need the ones you provide.
What do you think? Has the time come to do away with bookmarking chicklets? Or you think many of your readers actually use these and you have seen a traffic spike since you have started using them?
You use a bookmarking chicklet yourself! 🙂
Ofcourse I do! I struggled with that question when I was writing this post 🙂 Then decided to go with it because I regularly change the layout and number of chicklets. I would like to add tracking code behind them to see what works and doesn’t but I dont have that capability. Maybe someone can help.
Also, the post is actually about how senselessly people are using these on their blogs and websites, thus rendering them useless.
I read the post on Facebook & came here to post the same thing but I see it already is. 😛
But, yeah sometimes people do go overboard with the no. of share buttons.
yeah.. that’s true! I remember WATBlog used to have this obscene number of chicklets, most of which were either dead or I couldn’t even recall..
I used to use a plugin so people could bookmark my posts. The fact that no one did made my finally scrap it and just use retweet button. At least people use it.
These buttons serve the purpose of getting more traffic to the site. So I do it manually now. I don’t digg it, just post them to N4G and gamekicker and I stand a chance of getting more traffic than digg ever sent
Yeah.. I am also on the verge of scrapping my plugin. Can anyone tell us more about their experience with the retweet plugin? Is it any better like Balu (above) mentions? If yes, how?
Ok, I guess I’ll be brave and deactivate the bookmarking chicklets. Will also install the TweetMeme plugin and see how that goes!
Also disqus helps drive more traffic. If implemented properly that is =D But with disqus there is no guarantee they will stay on page. They might just glance around and close the tab
How does one go about implementing Disqus ‘properly’? I have had a bad experience with them in the past – their servers were down just when I was measuring page load times, exporting disqus comments from my earlier blogger address was not an option, and so on.
All of these have lead me to dislike third-party commenting systems in general.
I guess they will help you expand your audience!
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