Which Social Media Buttons To Put On Your Blog [Infographic]

With the new Google changes, a lot of people have been focusing lately on making sure their website is SEO friendly. One thing that is important to remember though is that it is equally as important to make sure your website is socially friendly too. Everyone I know who is serious about making an impact with their blog has social media buttons available for their readers, but what I’m talking about goes deeper than that.

For us here at Bit Rebels, this has been something we’ve experimented with a lot, and I’m still not convinced we’ve found the exact right fit for us yet. Have you ever been on a site and wanted to share the content with your social media audience, and you had trouble finding the buttons?

I’m shocked at how often that still happens to me, and it’s usually on the websites of big brands. The flip side of that is just as bad though. Have you ever been on a site, and they have so many social media buttons everywhere that it detracts from the content and looks cluttered from a design perspective? That’s not good either. The key is to know your readers and where they like to share your content, and then add just the right number of buttons, in the right place, to make it easy for them to access each one without any hassle. The decision you make regarding this could be huge in terms of your blog’s presence in social media (which equates to pageviews), and it’s definitely something worth your attention.

This infographic called Where’s The Love? by Crestmedia Internet Marketing provides some very interesting data. What they’ve done is take the top 50 small business sites according to Alexa (one of the leading Internet statistics engines where every site is listed and ranked according to traffic) and analyzed how they utilize social sharing buttons. It’s no surprise that almost all of them have Facebook and Twitter buttons, but I was surprised to see that only 3 out of 50 have a Pinterest button, and less than half of the 50 have a Google+ button. However, the most interesting stat to me is that 36% (18 out of the 50 sites) have social media buttons in more than one place on the home page. I hope you find this little piece of data useful, and I’d love to know the strategy you used when deciding which buttons (and how many) to put on your own blog.