Social sharing buttons

Visitors boost your SEO by sharing your web page with others – help them do this with sharing buttons.

With the growth of social networks, the way visitors share links and content with each other has changed. When the Internet first became popular, emailing hyperlinks was the primary way to send pages to friends and colleagues. Although this still happens, visitors are increasingly using Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, StumbleUpon and others services to spread web pages they like. One study shows that shared links now account for as much as 33% of traffic driven by search.

Sharing has two important influences on how visitors react to your content:

  • Trust: in situations where there’s a friendship tree or relationship between the sharer and recipient, the recipient is significantly more likely to follow and trust the link because it came from somebody they know. Unlike traffic from search engine queries, the time spent viewing a page and the number of pages views is significantly highly in share referrals. For e-commerce sites, visitors are significantly more like to buy products based upon social recommendations.
  • Reach: where sharers and recipients don’t know each other and “recommended sites” are based upon aggregation of recommendations (such as Digg, Reddit and StumbleUpon), each action of sharing is like a vote. Web pages with the most votes receive substantial third-party traffic, even though the visitors don’t know all the people who shared your link. This enables web sites to reach a large audience that’s otherwise unlikely to find their content.

Social sharing can produce such increases in traffic that many websites have crashed due to suddenly appearing on the front page of Digg. To take advantage on the growth and impact of sharing, your web pages should make it as easy as possible for visitors to share content they like, so adding social buttons and icons helps a visitor do this with a single click.

Additionally, the book covers how to manually and automatically add social buttons throughout your website.