Social sharing buttons greatly increase the number of shares. Image: Flickr / nanpalmero / CC-BY
Social sharing is an incredibly important component of branding, marketing, and search engine optimization. For more than half of websites, increasing the number of social shares is simple.
The effect of a share button
For the Social Share Report, BrightEdge surveyed 10,000 of the most popular websites on the internet. Of those 10,000 websites, 53.6 percent of the sites displayed at least one social networking or share button on their homepage. A site with social share links or buttons is up to seven times more likely to appear on social networks as sites that do not have those buttons.
What this means for your website
The takeaway from this survey is simple: You should have social share buttons available on your website. Facebook share buttons are the most popular, but Facebook, Twitter, G+, and LinkedIn buttons all drive sharing. As announced earlier this week, Bing will be considering Twitter and Facebook in ranking search results, and Google will be considering G+. LinkedIn is not necessarily partnered with any single search engine, though the results do appear in both Google and Bing search results.
Easy ways to add social buttons
On WordPress sites, adding social sharing links is as easy as configuring a plugin. Google has not yet opened up the API for its social network, so not all social sharing applications include G+. Inclusion of this network should improve as time goes on.
- Social Share – Includes G+
- Trackable Social Share Icons includes the number of shares in Google Analytics event tracking
- Social Sharing Toolkit also includes G+ buttons
