Social Media is a valuable tool for promoting all your content. But with so many social networks providing their own individual content sharing and follow buttons, it’s often difficult to know which social media button to use for what purpose.
Are you happy with how social share buttons work on your website? Do they auto-populate with information that makes your brand look good on social networks? You need to make sure your social share buttons contain customized messaging that’s easy for your readers to use and benefits your brand.
The first step in understanding the nuances of all the various social media buttons is being able to differentiate between social media sharing buttons and social media follow buttons.
This is useful to identify what kind of button you need.
Follow buttons
Social Media follow buttons serve to promote your presence on various social networks and help you generate followers for those particular accounts. By placing these buttons on your website, you can help to create visibility for your social media accounts. You can place these buttons anywhere on your website.
Share buttons
These links and buttons enable your visitors to easily share your content on their social media networks. Adding these buttons to your content allows you to expand the reach of your content to new audiences and generate new visitors back to your website. You should add social media sharing links/buttons to every piece of content you create. An optimized share button automatically generates a shareable message with custom information for your brand.
Analytics
Google Analytics shows activity on these buttons within the Social Plugins section. Keep an eye on the volume of shares for each button. If you find that one button isn’t generating any shares, your audience simply may not use that social media channel. Consider removing the button to make room for others that perform well.
Take advantage of the custom attributes each platform’s share button provides to help ensure that your brand messaging stays intact when your content is shared.
