We sometimes find that clients get confused between the “Follow Us” icons added to digital media and the “Share This” functionality that allows visitors to directly share web pages through social media. These 2 things are not interchangeable.

Follow Us

The sole purpose of Follow Us links is to build your social media following. The convention is to display the logos of all your social media networks on your website or blog in a consistent button format. The buttons are simple html links to your accounts, pages, and channels within the social media networks. This allows users to quickly add or follow you from their own social media accounts.

Don’t underestimate the importance of these buttons. Or, more accurately, don’t underestimate the extreme ineptitude of social media search functions. It is often much easier to visit an organization’s homepage and click on their Twitter link than it is to search and find them within Twitter itself. The same can be said of Facebook and YouTube. The easier you make it for people to follow you, the better.

Follow Us links should appear in a sensible intuitive place on a website. Ideally, in the same place on every page of the website. Our favourite spot is somewhere in a vertical navigation bar. Try not to bury it in the footer because it’s too far past the content for people to find. Putting it in the masthead runs the risk that visitors won’t notice it.

Don’t get into the minutiae of social media logos unless your audience is very active within the networks. If your audience isn’t on Digg, Reddit or Friend Feed, don’t overwhelm them with logos they may not even recognize.

Make sure you post regularly and make a solid effort to build up your following. Nothing is more counter productive than asking visitors to follow or fan you, only for them to learn you have a tiny following and you haven’t updated in months.

Share This

Share This, AddThis, TweetMeme, etc. are an entirely different ball game from Follow Us icons. They are not simple html, but require code (usually javascript) that performs a very specific function. They do not link to your social media accounts. Instead, they open up a social network, make sure the user is signed in, and “talk to” the social network code to create a custom post from the user’s account linking to a webpage specified by you. This is not easily done which is why one uses prepackaged plugins like Share This, AddThis or TweetMeme.

Share This functionality is wicked cool because it lets your supporters promote specific pages within your website or blog on your behalf. It’s complicated because it has to work with a 3rd party system it can’t really control (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) and tell it what to do.

The Catch

It is not easy implementing Share This technology with anything other than a simple webpage. For example, including it in an email or a Flash page is a bitch. Why? Because they aren’t compatible with javascript. While it is possible to manually create a share this link by passing information to Facebook and Twitter through the html link, it’s capabilities are very limited. The cool part is it allows you to custom write tweets and Facebook posts on behalf of yourself. The drawback is it’s almost impossible to guarantee consistent results for a client. Think, “I tried to Facebook it from home and it looked all weird.”

This tech is being improved all the time to work within these limits. AddThis, for example, can be used with Flash. In my opinion, however, it’s not worth the hours of code tweaking and trouble shooting for more challenging media.

It’s my experience that if you don’t have someone who can quickly add the plug ins for you, straight social media promotion works just as well, especially since that’s where the majority of your share-inclined traffic will be coming from. Users are just as likely to retweet your bit.ly link right from Twitter as they are to use the Share This links on the page itself. The same goes for Facebook. If the content is cool, folks may be more inclined to just post it using the good ol’ cut and paste function than to use any fancy do it for me button. After all, the more things change, the more technology is a work in progress.

The Power and the Glory

Managed correctly, social media can significantly increase the traffic to your website. With a big enough following, anything you promote through your networks will get views – lots of views. So use that power wisely.

But before you try to promote something in social media, consider what people like to read and share, not just what you’d like to advertise. For example, we don’t put Share This links on our main website, only on our blog. Why? Because, really, does anyone care enough about our services to share them with their network? Hardly.

People like to share news, articles that teach them something, or opinion pieces that support their ideas. They likely won’t share a page about a product. But they might share a review about a product, or news about a new feature, etc.

Use social media for what it’s meant for and the rewards will be great: lots of your content being kicked around the social hemisphere. Bore people with your own agenda and people will think your Share This links are arrogant decorations.