Social media links/buttons - best practices

[mattotoole]

Has anyone tested social media buttons, to see which types, styles, and placements get the most clicks?  Should they go at the top of an article, or are they OK at the bottom?  Should the icons definitely have labels?  Display # of tweets and Likes?  How big should they be?

My preference is for discrete buttons with a smallish, plain icon and a label.  I don't display tweets or Likes, unless it's a healthy number.  And I still think a "share by email" icon is important.  I put them at the bottom of the article, to keep the home page uncluttered and lead the eye into reading the article.  I'm also concerned about leaking rank from the homepage, especially for a site that's still establishing itself.  But if moving buttons to the top gets more shares, that's probably better.

Is there a Wordpress plugin that you really like?  (I haven't found one yet - I'm still hardcoding my social media buttons.)

Opinions are great, but test results are better!  Can anyone share?

[RikkiD22]

I am really interested in this too. I personally agree with much of what you say. I keep the icons at the bottom of the page, dont show user amount or details - just keep them as basic as possible really!

I have used a number of WP plug ins but not found one I really like yet. Some look stylish but are really too in your face. It would be interesting to here which ones people recommend...

To go one step further on this topic, which social media do people show? Obviously there are hundreds out there but in terms of making the webpage readable and usable which do you normally go for? I tend to pick the typical email, twitter, fb, digg, stumbleupon and not too many others.

[MaryAnneG]

I think the results of such a test would be very site-dependent, with things like site/page layout and design, visitor eyetracking on a particular page, degree of visitor engagement with the page content, length and reading level of the content, embedded links in the content vs no links, etc.  having a bearing on the outcome.  Tests on my site may be totally irrellevant to yours.

I don't like showing numbers if there are only couple of  tweets or likes (or none at all) - can send a message that the page is NOT popular.

[Ecreativeworks]

Related to the plugins, my company just released a free social media icon Wordpress plugin, and I would very much like to get feedback from the SEO community on it. The Wordpress plugin page is here: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/trackable-social-share-icons/

In short, it adds icons to the bottom of posts, lets you choose from a dozen icon styles, scale the size of the icons, choose whether to include text with the icons, and of course choose which icons appear. In addition, any clicks on the icons are automatically recorded in your Google Analytics event tracking (requires the current, asynchronous analytics).

We made the plugin because we wanted the tracking, but the only plugins that did what we wanted also shared all kinds of user information with a 3rd party marketing agency -- and in the process also slowed page load speed.

At any rate, we just released the public version of the plugin and would really like to hear from a wider base about what features it might be lacking, what we should change, etc. Any feedback is greatly appreciated.

[mattotoole]

Julie,

Thanks for the plugin, I'm trying it on a non-profit site.  It'll be interesting to see what gets clicked, but again, it's only after-post chicklets w/ no comparision to top-of-post.  So I guess it doesn't answer my question...  yet.

Apparently no one has tested this, or they ain't talkin'!

PM sent with some feedback.

[Ecreativeworks]

I've never actually experimented with different placement, other than different positions on the bottom of posts. I can say that with one fairly popular site I run (25k visits/day) Faceook, Twitter, and email comprise just about all of the share clicks.

Of those, Facebook is clicked about twice as often as Twitter, and Twitter a bit more than twice as often as email. Despite that giant Facebook sharing lead, Twitter sends just about the same number of incoming referrals as Facebook.