subject: Are Social Bookmarking Buttons Necessary For My Website? [print this page] Let's see what are the Social bookmarking or voting buttons. In practice they simply are small icons or links which allow the users to bookmark a website. It can be done or by adding the bookmark to your browser, or by publishing the bookmark to an account that a user has in a social bookmarking site. This second option is obviously the best one, the reason is not difficult to understand. By publishing the bookmark to a service like Digg or StumbleUpon allow users to vote and re-share your bookmark, if they find it interesting. To be able to publish into one of this website first you need to register an account with them. Some of the problems that site administrators have to take care about is that many users unfortunately do not know what this buttons are there for. They read an article, if you wrote it well, they read it till the end, and there they find the social bookmarking buttons (you can place them also under the title, or where fit the best for your site layout). Here is the gap that a site administrator has to fill. How do you make user taking action? How can you "push" users to use the buttons? And if they do not have any account with any social bookmarking site, how do you make them open an account? This a very difficult answer to give. What I think that is good to use is a short sentence just before the social bookmarking button that explain why the users should use those buttons and why they should open an account with the social bookmarking site if they do not have already one. As we said the sentence should be short, clear and convincing. I just give you one easy example of what you can use in that sentence: "If you find our article useful please share it, you'll help us to keep writing other useful ones." In my opinion this sentence has to be: never forcing, like "We gave you the article, now share it..bla bla." Remember on the internet you should even more polite than in real life. In just a click a user can close your site and don't came back any more. Even if you think that social bookmarking buttons are not necessary because users never use it, I advice to keep them there, or to install them in a very visible spot of your web page. It does not take long time to install them, in most of the CMS (Content Management System, like WordPress, Joomla, Drupal...) is just an easy plugin, and maybe one day somebody will change your mind. Here are some of the most popular social bookmarking buttons that you can install into your internet site: ShareThis, Sexy Bookmarks, Add This. To install them most of the times you have to sign in and through a little and intuitive customization you'll be able to copy and paste the code into your web site.
Are Social Bookmarking Buttons Necessary For My Website?
