Social Media Buttons: Yes or No?

[davidcubed]

I have been a long time fan of having social media promotion buttons everywhere to make my content easy to promote and spread around, but they pretty much always look horrible, and never fully integrate into the design.

Also, I have found that maybe 10 people each week click on the button to promote, print or download my posts. Those ten clicks are out of thousands of unique visitors, so is it worth compromising a design to get those seven-ish promotions on Digg, StumbleUpon or Reddit?

Do you use Social Media promotion buttons or not, and what are your thoughts on them? Have you ever used them to promote an article?

[chrisgarrett]

I have quite small ones on my blog, but I find with digg you are actually best off putting it on once you already have some momentum. I agree though they dont tend to look great

[iisbum]

I have them on my blogs, but I set a custom field that controls which posts they appear on (and so when they appear), which I think is the best solution.

Not all posts are going to be social media worthy so why waste real estate on the ones that aren't.

Mubs

[deb_n]

I haven't put any on because I never liked the way they looked.

[jeffc]

I have them on my blogs, but I set a custom field that controls which posts they appear on (and so when they appear), which I think is the best solution.

Not all posts are going to be social media worthy so why waste real estate on the ones that aren't.

Mubs

That sounds like a really interesting solution. Would you be willing to write a guest post for Performancing explaining how to do that? If not, I suggest writing about it somewhere and I'll link to it.

[davidcubed]

Yeah, I like the custom field thing too... do tell!

[mcraven]

I really *really* hate how they look and feel.

Does anyone have any objective analytical data on whether or not they work?

[davidcubed]

Last 30 days on Xfep. Stats recorded by iBegin Share.

14 Bookmarks
-4 Diggs
-3 Delicious
-2 Mixx
-2 Reddit
-2 StumbleUpon
-1 Twitter

2 MyPC PDF's
1 Email

[hart]

I'm a glutton for hopeful votings but, toss them at the end of my post where I think it works best for readers.

However - I am finding a few stumblers sending me their posts with the Digg button right on top there - and asking for both stumble and digg at the same time - which, sometimes might come first before reading it - and, at times I feel unconfortable ... not for the double vote, but that I only send one or the other (SU/reddit) only.

[iisbum]

That sounds like a really interesting solution. Would you be willing to write a guest post for Performancing explaining how to do that? If not, I suggest writing about it somewhere and I'll link to it.

I'd love to do a guest post, not written for performancing before, let me know how you want to proceed.

Mubs