Deciding whether to put social share buttons at the top or bottom of your articles?
Here’s my take on it…
The big question you have to ask yourself is what purpose do these social share buttons serve?
- Are they for social proof? – showing off your website’s popularity or authority?
- Are they for priority? – helping users find the most popular (or most impactful) articles.
- Are they just because you think everybody’s doing it? – hahaha.
- Or are they really for sharing? – to help users share on their networks or bookmark to read/re-read later.
What most sites do (top, bottom, everywhere)
Most sites are annoying and spammy as heck. They place social share buttons everywhere; sometimes even with a sliding button rack that follows you along the page when you scroll down. As if readers are more likely to share because a convenient share button was placed there.
That might work for a Facebook post but not for a real website in my opinion. C’mon now…we both know that isn’t true. When was the last time you shared anything from a website? And when was the last time you did because the button was readily available?!
The only kind of sites that this works well for are sites with viral-based content or time-based content. Funny video, catchy news story, big sporting event. The kind of thing that’s shared because it’s mainstream stuff that easy to talk about.
But I’m willing to bet your site isn’t one of these. So then why do it? Some do it because they think it makes their site look more legitimate or more professional…since it has all the common visual elements or the more well-known sites. If this is your rationale, I’d advise you not to worry about that. If you want a “professional” looking site, you can do it simply by having a nice clean web design.
What many other sites do (bottom of article)
This is the other most common option. They put the social share buttons at the bottom of the article. This to me, makes the most sense as typically users don’t share until after they’ve read your content and totally identified with it. I also like this as being cleaner and less clutter/distraction around the top of your website when you want users to go straight to reading the article.
I prefer having a clean streamlined design more than anything. Clutter-free access to high-quality content! Believe me, if your content is that good….they’ll share it.
I think the worst case scenario is when sites throw social share buttons everywhere and they either A) have zero share counts so it looks like a super spammy site just recycling content, or B) distract from higher value conversions like your own products, newsletter sign-ups, etc.
I guess it’s not WHERE you put the share buttons but HOW you do it. Are they gonna be clean and discreet? Or obnoxious in-your-face, and begging for attention?
Which social share plugin are you using in this website?
Scriptless Social Sharing, great simple sharing plugin by Robin Cornett (another awesome Genesis developer). And I added some slight CSS hacks to adjust text and responsive behavior.
Thanks a lot! I’ll check it out. It’s a totally unrelated question but maybe you can help. I’ve integrated Ezoic via their wordpress plugin, so that I can disable it completely where I don’t want their script to be injected in my page.
Where I do have the plugin active the page is quite slow. Do you know if there is any way to defer the external js injected by their plugin? Thanks
Slow by eye? Or by speed test? Show me the test.
Here’s the test:
https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?hl=IT&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.fabionodariphoto.com%2Fclassifica-citta-piu-inquinate-al-mondo%2F&tab=mobile
and you can compare it with my homepage: https://www.fabionodariphoto.com/
Maybe run the tests a couple of times. Sometimes the ads are not shown to the visitors (normal behavior from Ezoic side)
I wouldn’t care that much if it weren’t for the fact that I get the warnings in search console. Not the major ranking factor for sure, but still Google isn’t too happy.
Are you in the WPJ facebook group? Can you post this on there? And we’ll have a nice back and forth chat about it. 🙂
Joined. Thanks!
Hi Johnny,
Thanks for providing another great article with out of the box content. Actually thought my webpage needed it to ¨look normal¨.
I try to avoid another plugin, but is a non tech person. Have created social sharing buttons myself.
If you scroll under the following text in the url you will see them:
https://www.laaneoversikten.no/zen-finans/#hvordan-s%C3%B8ke-refinansiering
I thought it should only be to add url. But when I did Google, it did not seem that easy. I thought it should be simple to make one Internet thing ¨talk¨ to another (was thinking I only needed to provide url from one place to another via link). But have not found this information.
Any advice?
FYI: using the theme GP
Sorry, I’m not sure I understood you properly. Are you not happy with the way it links?
Yvette from Låneoversikten here again, and thanks for your assistance. Have not done anything since I wrote my comments above, but now all links works. Very, very strange. But good news:).
Happy new years. Stay safe!
Johnny, do you find social sharing buttons less and less necessary? At least from my own personal use, I never click on those things – I use the mobile browser’s built-in sharing functionality, and I feel vast majority of people are behaving that way. For that reason, I consider deleting Scriptless from my site.
What are your thoughts, any data you could share?
Hahaha, yes. I do feel they are not so necessary and I don’t even use them either. Lots of these little things are taken into consideration for my next site redesign. 😉