Tuesday, July 06, 2010

How many and which social media icons?

Here's a collection of what others are doing:

Squidoo.com- Notice that there is both a fb share and friend. 



V7N.com/ forum - Notice that their share list is kept to a small list.  The obscure ones are left hidden behind the More button.  This way, real users, can find the icons they want without getting discouraged.






T4L Plan - The top level list is good. Arguably, it should also have FB-like but maybe that would interrupt the flow of someone across the site.  The More (plus) button takes users to an unrefined list which needs to be refined.  The next step in design is to review what it tweets or shares as a message. Is it the same for every page? Does it take the page title? How does it work?

4 comments:

Math Radical said...

AddThis has a section where it talks about which icons are most popular and trends the growth of each over time:
http://www.addthis.com/services

You can also compare button popularity between up to 3 countries:
http://www.addthis.com/services/compare-countries

Math Radical said...

...and by the way - This is kinda cool, too... The the pop-up menu that appears when you hover over the [More] button customizes itself based on the media buttons we use. It reminds me of the behavior of iGoogle, which sorts search results based on the browsing history and what we've clicked on in the past.

BBat50 said...

(my note on a forum)
I'm struggling to get indepth marketing feel for the impact and potential of the various FB icons that I can put on my different forums, blogs, and websites. Any true gurus out there? Here's the sort of questions that I'm wrestling with.

1. Are these the two basic choices?
Like
previously friend) - makes the visitor a fan of OUR Facebook page. Can only be used if the webpage has an associated Facebook page. It's done with an iframe.
Share (previously bookmark) - creates a link to the webpage on the user's profile page. Perhaps preferable for SEO.

2. On this forum (digital point), I see a Facebook icon at the top of most pages which is labelled with just an F, has an alt tag of "Facebook Platform", and which produces a pop-up asking permission to:

Connect Digital Point with Facebook to interact with your friends on this site and to share on Facebook through your Wall and friends' News Feeds.
Bring your friends and info<-------> Publish content to your Wall


What exactly does that do? Is it different than the Vbulletin-Facebook interface that will allow Facebook visitors to register using their FB identity?

3. On each thread in this forum, there is a LIKE button which seems count the number of likes. It didn't seem to post anything in my newsfeed or wall. Is it different than the Like which makes the visitor a friend/fan of the corresponding FB page?

4. Bottom line, I'm trying to update our social media icons across about a dozen sites. I'm probably dropping the bookmark approach with the technorati, stumbleupon, delicious, furl (or was it fark) and moving to:
- FB like icon (when we have a corresponding FB page)
- Tweet this (which means that we'll need a default message tied to each site or tweet icon)
- RSS Feed (for blogs or forums that generate it)
- Google reader - user chooses then to add a link on the homepage or put it in the reader
- share with technorati, stumbleupon, and delicious

Thoughts? Corrections? Gurus?

DavidBrond said...

Thank you so much for that nicely written piece of text.I've been working on getting my website up and going for a while now. I like how it's looking but I'm really trying to find some of the top seo companies out there to help me get more traffic. I've heard that this is the way to go so I'm really hoping it works. The one thing I'm not sure about is what to look for in top seo companies I've heard so many things that I'm not sure what the real answer is. I checked out www.bergstrom-seo.com but even there I wasn't 100% sure on what I was looking at. I was hoping that you could give me some good pointers and ideas on what really makes these companies the best in the biz.