Are we getting immune to social media buttons?

[weegillis]

Often I've wondered if social media buttons will eventually fall off our visual radar the way banner ads of the past did, and last week this article surfaced:

Sweep the Sleaze

Personally, I found that having live connections to FB in a page, or in multiple parts of a page caused such a tremendous performance hit that I finally opted to remove them, and replace them with a simple FB page button and link. This is just my own experience, and the reason against having SM buttons. Performance, not social value.

My favorite quote reflects earlier comments I made when this forum started sporting buttons:

“… those insipid per-post social media buttons”

How are others tackling both sides (techie and social) of this question?

[MrKappa]

Some of the connections can, and do bring down entire websites for a few seconds at a time, and there is a performance hit.

I've found any sort of malfunction, to be few and far between, very rare, but the chances one of those widgets causeing a malfuction with another script on the page is pretty high and it requires some reworking of scripts in some cases.

Personally, the concept of adding 3rd domain scripts is a risky one, as it does open the door to cross site scripting attacks, so I try to keep 3rd party scripts to minimum.

As for becoming immune. I've never actually used one of those share/like buttons myself. Not that I can remember. Maybe I've used the like button a couple times to try it out, but I have to log into facebook to use it.

I am more of a copy paste type person.

That's not to say other people don't use it. If I had to guess there are quite a few twitter types who love to use the buttons, especially since there is such limited room for text in Twitter. Not entirely sure how other people use it.

I just went to a popular magazine style website, and it's clear as day that the twitters folks use those buttons ALOT more than facebook people do. Probably not the same everywhere, but... just an observation.

Twitter probably has more mobile people too. Maybe a one click is easier on a mobile than it is on a desktop. The Magazine style website I've mentioned earlier, when I flip it to mobile mode, it shows tweet buttons, and google plus buttons, and no face-book like buttons, so that's probably a huge factor as well.

But on second look it's not. The mobile version has a different tweet count than the main site, and the main site has substantially more tweets than the mobile version. In fact it seems the Google Plus is super popular on the mobile versions compared to the tweets. Pretty sure the mobile version is just for first generation iphones, and some older androids perhaps with the smaller screens though. Not 100% sure.



So, just considering the website I've looked at. Tweeters seem to be the people who make the most use of it. Until it gets to mobile small screens where Google+ seems to be more popular.

[claybutler]

I've wondered about that too. I have one very popular post that had 128,000 Stumbles...and that was without a single button. I only added the Stumble button after the fact. I have a feeling the social bookmarking people probably use a plugin in their phone or browser a lot and don't rely on buttons on the page. I just put them there to make it a bit easier and also to remind people that they can share it. But I also do it for myself as it's interesting to see the social bookmarking stats for each page on my blogs. But mainly I just do it because everyone else does. I figure if every blog, news portal and ezine is doing it, it probably has some merit.

[chrisJumbo]

I do use the buttons on other sites. It does make it easy to share. Of course, I realize the potential value to that site. The buttons haven't helped our site. I never put Facebook on because it seemed to load quite slow. I just have Twitter and G+. I do like the points that IA makes. And overall they suggest to test. They go back and edit the article and add comments they have received. Potentially encouraging others to share in the discussion.

cd :O)

[ozdogan]

As a website owner:

I generally will not use them on my sites unless my sites are well hosted. The other thing I noticed is that it is not worth the trouble of having them on a website where you have an ordinary web hosting. Search engines like Google do skip slow sites. Internet is about milli-second responses. Perhaps an internet Marketer has other ways of spreading the good news about their website and in a more faster and efficient way without sacrificing web-server resources.

As a Web Surfer:

I have never ever clicked on a social network button for many years. Then again I don't use them simply because time is valuable commodity. Those who say it takes a few clicks are either addicts to such technology or have no notion of reality.

These days there are filters in browsers like Firefox that eliminate third party links like Facebook. I have this feature on in my browser and it makes browsing much faster eliminating those awful Javascript and Frames from being loaded. I can't stand Facebook and other similar Social networks that do this. The plugin that I use that allows me to block third party networks is called adblock for Firefox.

[murphypj]

I'll be honest, my dabbling in adding social buttons to my site has been mainly clueless, just trying out options suggested mainly on this forum. But, about 6 months ago, I created a Facebook 'Page' ( I really hate the terminology FB uses for these things ), having set up a FB 'profile' some years ago.

My initial excursion into FB was purely to engage with guitar players ( My site is a guitarist resource ) which was fine 5 or 6 years ago, when none of my friends/family were on FB, but over time the page/profile was split between my people who wanted to see what my latest guitar posts and info were, and friends and family posting personal stuff.

So - I set up the 'page', posted a few messages telling my guitar 'friends' that future info would be available there. Out of about 350 guitarists on my list, about 50 'liked' the new page. On the other hand, I also posted FB buttons on my site at the same time, pointing to the new page.

On my website, the 'Like' button shows that about 1,500 visitors clicked. The new FB page has now about 600 followers, only 50 or so of these are listed as 'friends' from my original 'profile' page. Setting aside the fact that I now have to post new info to both FB sites, it does indicate that placing the button on my website has at least generated a few hundred followers of the new FB page. In contrast, at around the same time I added a Twitter button and a Google+ button, and these have generated practically no new followers.

Given that I have about 2,000 new visitors per day = 360,000 new visits over 6 months, I would have to say that the social media buttons have not been a success, as they have been displayed on several hundred pages on my site over this time.

If anyone knows of a technique to optimize these buttons to achieve a higher sign-up rate, I'd be glad to hear it.

PJ

[weegillis]

@murphypj, you hit upon it. It would appear that just having a FB link to YOUR FB page is the way to bring traffic THERE from your page. Traffic to your web page(s), and FB pages is coming from FB. The buttons (at least for FB with attendant script/css attached) are almost meaningless, imho. I'm not plugged in so cannot assess anything further than this.

[Clint1]

Often I've wondered if social media buttons will eventually fall off our visual radar the way banner ads of the past did, and last week this article surfaced:

We can only hope! (I feel a rant coming on....... ).......I for one am SICK of them. You can't go to any webpage without being attacked by this crap; FaceBook, Digg, Twitter, Stumble, the list is endless! Hey, "Digg" this! "Trend" this! "Stumble" on this! And to make matters even more annoying, TV network a$$holes are even putting these satan-spawned buttons constantly on the screen for every TV show you try and watch! As if their annoying obnoxious contrasty huge network logos burning a hole into our plasma/LCD TV screens were not already bad enough, now it's even more crap on the screen! Then we have to see these brain-bleeding scrolling marquis of scrolling BS comments from every loser on the planet "with a hashtag"!! ........

"#IHaveBuriedBodyPartsInMyBackYard: Hey that was cool".....
"#GetALife: Yeah".......
"#ILiveInMyMomsBasement: Huh?".....
"#ISaveMyOwnUrine: My finger hurts".......

It's like trying to watch an episode of Nancy Grace and seeing nothing but SIX to EIGHT lines of "URGENT BREAKING NEWS" (even though it's DAYS old), "HOLY CRAP", "OMG", "SHOCKING", "OUTRAGE", "CAN YOU BELIEVE THIS", "OH MY GOD, WE'RE ALL GONNA FRICKIN' DIE", etc., etc., etc., taking up a THIRD of the screen! ( )

"Hashtag"?? "Trending"??? GIVE ME A FRICKIN' BREAK! I'm so sick of hearing those terms my head is going to explode from apoplexy! And how frickin' redundant is this: #STOPTheInsanity or @STOPTheInsanity, etc., that's like putting http:// and or www in front of every frickin' web address we see anywhere in print or on TV! It's IMPLIED! We don't need to see it, and stop saying "HASHTAG"! Just put the frickin' loser word or phrase there and leave off your asinine "cute little (annoying) characters"! (Now I'm starting to make myself laugh. )

I wanna watch TV or read a webpage, not see a fireworks display!!

When my plasma TV gets RUINED from these "devil troll icons", I'll be sending a collective bill to all the networks I watch! And......

Personally, I found that having live connections to FB in a page, or in multiple parts of a page caused such a tremendous performance hit that I finally opted to remove them, and replace them with a simple FB page button and link. This is just my own experience, and the reason against having SM buttons. Performance, not social value.

.....That is the other problem! Our net access may keep getting faster and faster, but it's pale in comparison to the ever-escalating performance hits surfers have to endure with these unending plethora of images and supported JS code BS added to webpages sucking up bandwidth and space.

Whew, that was fun. (Hee hee).