I have discussed articles before on this site about various Social Media Share button plugins like Digg Digg, Flare, Sharebar and others which offer both a floating sidebar that can host social media share buttons but also share buttons which show the current share count for the various social networks you want to display and encourage others to share on.
Here are some pros and cons and things to consider when using these kinds of plugins, how they are configured and hopefully it will help you make the best decision for your own blog.
Floating Bar
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While it certainly looks nice to have a floating bar to the left or right of a blog post that scrolls along with the blog post, this can be a really pain for mobile users of your website. None of the plugins I tested are smart enough to recognize screen size or browser type so the float bar will actually squash into the readable area of the post on some or simply not even be visible at all and therefore useless on a 7" or smaller screen and many may not function right on a 10" tablet screen either.
So unless you are using a mobile compatible theme like WP Touch Pro to use a separate them for mobile devices and have your floating sharebar plugin disabled for that mobile theme this could be a big hindrance for your mobile users.
Share Buttons with Count
Sure we all love interactive share buttons that let you share directly from the page instead of calling up an external link as well as ones that display how many shares you have received.
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But this comes at two potential costs, one is that the more share buttons you have the worse the performance and pageload times of your posts will be. If you don’t believe me just do a Google PageSpeed Insights performance test of your blog with and without your sharing bar plugin enabled and you may notice quite a difference, in my case it was 87 PageSpeed score to 95 PageSpeed score with Digg Digg disabled.
Some of this can be rectified with coding that loads asynchronously, doesn’t bog the page or force the page to wait…etc and some plugins are better than others, but ultimately until that last script loads it’s resources your page isn’t done loading.
The other factor is that if you have a very low number of shares it could give the impression that the post is unpopular or your blog is new/unpopular. So having 1-2 shares for a post that is weeks old (if you publish less frequently than once per day) may also make your site less attractive and appear not popular.
Some big sites are opting for static share buttons without showing a count at the bottom of their article, Gizmodo has a very minimal share, it is a star to share the article and then you select the network for example.
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Though they still have 1 left social sharing for Facebook only and the widget shows # of comments and views it no longer has a Twitter/Google+ count sharing anywhere on a post.
While Mashable currently takes the opposite approach and has even added StumbleUpon recently to it’s social sharing lineup of buttons at the top of articles.
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But again, do you keep social sharing buttons that show such a low sharing count, are they worth keeping around for the occasional rogue share?
What is your opinion on social sharing buttons, floating, top, bottom, show the # of shares, static, which do you think works best and is it still a balance of performance vs. usability vs. cosmetics?
This is an original article from WP Cypher Copyright 2012
