

Why Omitting Social Media Buttons is a Bad Idea - camwest
http://blog.kera.io/post/33819046901/why-omitting-social-media-buttons-is-a-bad-idea

======
lewisflude
Personally, I love social sharing buttons. Without them, I believe sharing of
pages (especially blog posts) would decrease drastically. I am a fan of
minimal design trends, omitting everything but the essential from a page and I
respect why some people have strong feelings on the subject.

I think we, as the tech community need to find ways of facilitating the needs
of everyone in a way that's natural. I like the idea that I can share to
Facebook (with my close friends) to Twitter (with my followers who may or may
not know me in real life) and I can also see the use for Google+ and LinkedIn
for sharing with professional contacts.

What does need to die however, is the overuse of social sharing buttons. I've
been to way too many sites where you have a social sharing strip before AND
after the article and then a floating sidebar to top it all off.

Would love to see a report from KISSMetrics / Mixpanel on how effective the
various implementations of social sharing buttons are.

Edit: Said "personally" too many times

~~~
camwest
Yeah, it's interesting to see the mobile approach with this. A single browser
based share button which can be hooked up to all the social networks that are
important to you.

One thing this misses is the social proof aspect of the sharing buttons.

~~~
lewisflude
Anecdotally, I've been using Mountain Lion for just over a month now and while
I initially thought the OS level integration with Twitter and Facebook would
be really useful to me, I've hardly needed to touch it wheras on mobile
(Android) I usually go with the browser's built in sharing function. I'm still
not sure if we're seeing a shift towards mobile rather than people just
consuming content in multiple ways, but if that were the case I think OS level
sharing is going to gradually become more important maybe even overtaking
social sharing buttons. Also, as an aside, saw Kera a few days ago, looks
really awesome.

