@iA wrote up an excellent post on rethinking the actual value of those social media buttons.
Why I’m removing sharing links from my blog
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3 responses to “Why I’m removing sharing links from my blog”
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Unfortunately the essay is full of holes and the author doesn’t allow for comments or discussions so it might as well be nothing. The thing most techies and professional web people (like us) is that we think we are our clients. Of course, you and I and “us” know how to share any article on any of our networks if we choose. Whether the share buttons are there or not… but many people can’t figure that out and if you put those buttons there, they *will* share your articles with their friends and networks. Removing the share buttons is one of the dumbest ideas to hit the techie circles.
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@Oscar Gonzalez you notice I titled this why <em>I</em> am removing sharing links, not necessarily why <em>everyone</em> should stop using sharing links. For me, I have never noticed any increase in the sharing of my posts with them being there, so they just get in the way. We all <em>assume</em> they do some good when they are there, but I don’t know that that necessarily applies in every single case. And, as the post points out, surely the readers of a tech blog like Mashable know what to do with a post they like and how to share it — I’ve also never used a single one of those sharing links on Mashable (or pretty much any other blog that I can think of, really), but that’s not to say that I don’t share it.
But that doesn’t apply across the board and I don’t think that the post implies that it should. It’s about knowing your audience and surely the audience of a tech blog (or, in my case, a personal blog that no one reads :) ) would know what to do with a post they wanted to share whether or not the buttons were there for them to do it.
The OTHER thing that goes into this is assuming that people all use the same services to share stuff. This is a flawed assumption. Just because Facebook, Google+, Twitter, etc. have market share in the US doesn’t mean that anyone uses them in China, India, Japan, Russia, Iraq, etc. Then there’s the people who are using lesser-known sharing sites or sharing sites that *don’t* get put on these lists for whatever reason (Reddit, Delicious, etc) that would force their users to have to figure out how to share it to those circles ANYWAY or, alternately, dump <em>even more</em> sharing buttons in the post so it starts to look like a circus tent. I find those sharing blocks with a million different options and third party services that will post to your selected sharing service (e.g. ShareThis) even more obnoxious than the sharing links/buttons themselves, and it’s not something that I really want to put on my blog if I don’t have to.
I think the point of the article is not that it is true or accurate, but rather to question whether we <em>need</em> to be doing this thing that we’ve all just sort of taken for granted. -
@Oscar Gonzalez
You notice I titled this why *I* am removing sharing links, not necessarily why *everyone* should stop using sharing links. For me, I have never noticed any increase in the sharing of my posts with them being there, so they just get in the way. We all *assume* they do some good when they are there, but I don’t know that that necessarily applies in every single case. And, as the post points out, surely the readers of a tech blog like Mashable know what to do with a post they like and how to share it — I’ve also never used a single one of those sharing links on Mashable (or pretty much any other blog that I can think of, really), but that’s not to say that I don’t share it.
But that doesn’t apply across the board and I don’t think that the post implies that it should. It’s about knowing your audience and surely the audience of a tech blog (or, in my case, a personal blog that no one reads :) ) would know what to do with a post they wanted to share whether or not the buttons were there for them to do it.
The OTHER thing that goes into this is assuming that people all use the same services to share stuff. This is a flawed assumption. Just because Facebook, Google+, Twitter, etc. have market share in the US doesn’t mean that anyone uses them in China, India, Japan, Russia, Iraq, etc. Then there’s the people who are using lesser-known sharing sites or sharing sites that *don’t* get put on these lists for whatever reason (Reddit, Delicious, etc) that would force their users to have to figure out how to share it to those circles ANYWAY or, alternately, dump *even more* sharing buttons in the post so it starts to look like a circus tent. I find those sharing blocks with a million different options and third party services that will post to your selected sharing service (e.g. ShareThis) even more obnoxious than the sharing links/buttons themselves, and it’s not something that I really want to put on my blog if I don’t have to.
I think the point of the article is not that it is true or accurate, but rather to question whether we *need* to be doing this thing that we’ve all just sort of taken for granted.
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