Social media can be a great promotional vehicle for sharing your content and helping it reach an extended audience beyond your direct network of fans, followers, and subscribers. But are you missing out on some low-hanging fruit to make sure you give your content what's necessary to help it spread?
When it comes to spreading content in social media, some of the easiest-to-pick pieces of low-hanging fruit are social sharing buttons. Adding social sharing buttons for sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google+ to your website, blog articles, and landing pages is a simple way to encourage visitors to spread your content and reach even more potential customers.
So if it's so easy, everyone must be doing it, right? Wrong.
According to a recent study conducted by SEO platform BrightEdge Technologies, the homepages of almost half of the top 10,000 websites studied (46.4%) had no social links or plugins installed.
But what's even more interesting is the impact of the social sharing buttons that were used on the other 53.6% of websites. Looking at the effect of social plugins on a website’s traffic and how much content is shared, BrightEdge also conducted analysis on over 4 million tweets. When studying how often a website using a Twitter sharing button was mentioned on Twitter, on average, a website with no Twitter share button was mentioned just four times. However, websites that did include a Twitter sharing button were mentioned 27 times, on average. Therefore, including a Twitter share button increased Twitter mentions sevenfold.
Marketing Takeaway
Don't miss out on easy opportunities to help your content and messages spread. Adding sharing buttons to your website is simple, yet half of the top websites don't do it.
BrightEdge Technologies' study focused on social sharing buttons on websites' homepages. While a website's homepage isn't the only place marketers should be adding social sharing links, the study's findings indicate just how powerful they can be. When incorporating social sharing buttons into your website, be sure to add them to any page you have content -- landing pages, blog articles, product pages, etc. It's an easy, sure-fire way to extend your reach.
Have you added social sharing buttons to your content yet?
Photo Credit: joyosity
Inbound Marketing Blog Feed
jazan 1:43 PM on September 13, 2011
Thanks for letting us know .We do not going to forget ;)
Yes its right social book mark button really helps a lot .
Elaine Davis 3:45 PM on September 13, 2011
How do I ad a sharing button?
Laura Kinoshita 1:07 AM on September 14, 2011
Great post! I posted an article on Linked In and got activity on my social sharing buttons right away! .
Multilingual Search Marketer 3:53 AM on September 14, 2011
Great post but is this cause and effect, or is it simply that webmasters who use social media buttons are actively using a more aggressive strategy when it comes to social media? Mentions on Twitter could be self generated? If the webmaster has embraced social media sharing buttons and implemented them onsite then its likely they are more aware, and interested in using Twitter to develop brand mentions? Do we know these buttons are the origination of those tweets - if not then having buttons onsite is not necessarily the only reason brands get more mentions on Social Media?
Gina Rau 7:30 PM on September 15, 2011
We see similar results from our Janrain customers. With our social sharing plugin that allows users to simultaneously share to multiple networks with one click, brands can quadruple these results! The referral traffic back to the website grows with each shared activity, creating a spiral of activity from one piece of content.
More and more digital marketers are witnessing the power of turning their site visitors into brand advocates who help create word of mouth advertising on their behalf. The number of sites using social sharing tools will increase significantly over the next 6 to 9 months.