The Use of Social Media Buttons for Bloggers

by Steven Snell on Jun.20, 2009, under Internet Marketing

by Steven Snell

Every blogger wants to have a lot of readers for their blog. No one wants to be writing without an audience. It’s human nature to always want more, and this is true with blog subscribers and visitors. For bloggers, one of the best ways to promote your site is to use social media and social networking sites.

Bloggers can devote their time in different ways in order to get better results with social media (writing new blog posts, networking with other social media users, etc.), but one thing that tends to get some easy results is to use recognized social media icons and voting buttons on the blog.

Voting buttons and icons work well for very simple reasons. First, they encourage visitors to vote for your content. And second, they make it easy for visitors to do so.

Common Mistakes When Using Social Media Icons/Buttons

Because voting buttons, widgets and icons can encourage votes and lead to more visitors through social media, many bloggers tend to overdo them. You will see blogs with voting buttons for every possible social media site you can image.

This is a bad approach to take. Too many icons and buttons will leave you with a very cluttered blog that isn’t easily readable, and it will be distracting to readers. Additionally, this approach tends to result in votes that are spread out over a large number of social media sites, which will usually produce poor results.

If you have 20 different voting buttons on your site and you get one vote through each button, you’ll see very little, if any, traffic as a result. However, if you have one or two voting buttons and you get 20 votes, it will make a difference in your traffic levels (depending on the particular social media sites).

By showing only a few voting buttons, you are helping visitors by telling them that these are the specific sites where you want votes. With too many buttons they will not know which sites are your preferred places to get votes.

Ways to Use Social Media Icons

The best approach is to only use about two or three buttons on your blog to produce maximum results. Pick the sites that you target based on how well they match up with your blog’s audience, as well as their potential to send visitors to your blog.

Another thing to keep in mind is that small bloggers will typically not have the best results if they are only targeting major social media sites like Digg. With a small audience, you are much more likely to get significant exposure from a smaller niche-specific social media site that will require fewer votes in order to become “popular.”

Some blogs will have audience that consist largely of people that do not use social media. If this is the case for you, consider using your blog to inform your readers about a particular social media site, how they can use it, and how they can vote for you.

About the Author:

Steven Snell is runs a blog, Traffikd, that covers social media and internet marketing. If you’re looking for some great social media voting icons to use on your blog, see Steven’s list at Traffikd.