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02.22.07
Social Media Icons: How Many Is Too Many?
 By Steven Bradley
As some of you know I'm working on a redesign of my site. Part of the reason for the new design is optimizing the site more for social media, including the use of bookmarklets at the bottom of posts.
This afternoon I did some searching to find some icons I could grab and use in Photoshop to see how they fit with the design. I found the images I was looking for, but I also found a lot of negative sentiment about sites that use social media icons.
I know there are plenty of sites that take the icons too far and add them for every possible social media repository under the sun, but I was surprised to find some people so against seeing any at all.
Of the articles I came across that were against the use of social media bookmarklets the earliest complaints were from Chris Pirillo's post Social Bookmarking Button Madness.
These buttons are annoying more than anything else, serving to show the world just how unpopular your content really is - and I believe that there's no direct correlation between the number of social bookmarking buttons you place on your page(s) has any direct impact on the number of times those page(s) have been stored in the respective services.
Chris also mentions that most content isn't really worth making the Digg front page or being bookmarked at del.icio.us and I agree. Most pages don't deserve it, but you can't always tell which ones do deserve it or which ones will make it regardless of their worthiness. And I do find irony in the fact that Chris has three blocks of AdSense on a page where he talks about social media icons being annoying.
I also came across a post on 37signals, It's the content, not the icons, which makes the argument
The reason posts wind up at Digg, Delicious, or elsewhere isn't because the authors made it easier to vote for them (it's already easy). A post winds up at these sites because people respond to its content and quality.
Again I agree. If your content is going to make it to the front page of any social media site it has to be good content. But it also needs to be submitted in the first place. And I know most people who are familiar with social media probably know how to submit your posts, but why not help them along by making it easier for them. Isn't that one of the first rules of social media optimization.
The 37signals post also argues that none of the Technorati 100 are using them. I only checked three of the 100 and while none had an abundance of icons I did find two of the three sites I looked at with a link to Digg and one with icon asking me to 'Sphere It." The links may not have been there when the 37signals post was written, but they are there as I'm writing this one.
Even if we assume there are no icons on the top 100 blogs I think there's a flaw in the argument. Most of those sites get enough traffic that someone will submit the better content regardless of how easy it may or may not be. That's not the case for most of us. If you accept the argument then you could also argue there's no reason to provide an RSS icon or a link to subscribe. The latest browsers alert you when there's a feed available and can subscribe to the feed without the link. Those of us who do subscribe to feeds already know how to do it and don't need the help. And why ask someone to "Tell a Friend" since everyone knows how to use email?
Most of the other articles I came across were along the same lines. Mainly annoyance at seeing the icons and arguments that they don't work to increase how often your page gets submitted and only serve to cheapen your site.
Continue reading this article.
About the Author:
Steven Bradley is a web designer and search engine optimization
specialist. Known to many in the webmaster/seo community by the username
vangogh, he is the author of TheVanBlog, which focuses on how to build
and optimize websites and market them online.
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