Do Social Sharing Buttons Still Work? | Ep. #372

In Episode #372, Eric and Neil discuss whether social sharing buttons still work. Tune-in to learn whether social sharing buttons are effective in driving traffic to your site, how to use them properly if you still wish to use them, and an alternative to the buttons that is proven to work.

Time Stamped Show Notes:

  • 00:27 – Today’s topic: Do Social Sharing Buttons Still Work?
  • 00:39 – Sumo is a plugin for social share buttons
  • 00:47 – Eric personally uses Buffer to share
  • 00:58 – Neil tracked the social share button clicks
    • 01:03 – It drives traffic once in awhile
  • 01:22 – The only way to get traffic from social share buttons are to integrate them within the post
    • 01:30 – Click to tweet
    • 01:34 – Having quotes or snippets within your blog post that is easy to share drives more traffic
    • 01:45 – Integrating the buttons within the blog post is more effective than scrolling social buttons within the blog
  • 02:05 – The percentage of clicks is NOT high
  • 02:25 – For Eric, social sharing buttons don’t work
  • 02:33 – If you still put them in, just choose the major social media sites
  • 02:50 – Marketing School is giving away a free 1 year subscription to Crazy Egg which is a visual analytics tool that helps you increase your conversion rate
  • 03:46 – That’s it for today’s episode!

3 Key Points:

  1. Social sharing buttons does work, but it needs to be integrated into the post.
  2. An alternative to social sharing buttons is adding a click to tweet somewhere in your post.
  3. If you still want social sharing buttons, just pick the major social media sites.

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Full Transcript of The Episode

Speaker 1: Get ready for your daily dose of marketing strategies and tactics from entrepreneurs with the guile and experience to help you find success in any marketing capacity. You're listening to Marketing School with your instructors Neil Patel and Eric Siu.

Eric Siu: Welcome to another episode of Marketing School. I'm Eric Siu.

Neil Patel: And I'm Neil Patel.

Eric Siu: And today we're going to talk about if social sharing buttons still work? We have social sharing buttons on our site, you can use different plug-ins out there. There's Sumo, for example. But for me I don't think I've actually clicked on a social sharing button for years. For me personally I just use Buffer if I want to share something. But just because I do something one way doesn't mean other people do it that way. I'm curious to get your thoughts around this because a lot of people read your stuff Neil.

Neil Patel: I've tracked the clicks on them, not even a half a percent of the people are clicking on these social sharing buttons. They do drive traffic every once in a while. What's even funny is sometimes I'll see more tweets on my article than how much traffic that article has received from Twitter, which is kind of funny. Which means people are just Tweeting things out and sharing things out but no one's really even like clicking on them. Secondly the other thing that I've learned from social sharing is the only way to really boost your traffic from these social sharing buttons is to integrate them within your copy. What's the one when you can take quotes from your blog post and tweet them out?

Eric Siu: Click to tweet.

Neil Patel: Click to tweet, there you go. You can take snippets within your blog post that are factoids or quotes and use click to tweet to generate more social shares. That works extremely well. Integrating social buttons within your blog post is much more effective than just having scrolling social buttons like I have on my blog. Everyone should be putting it within their text, but people like me are kind of lazy and already get enough traffic where I just don't care that much.

Eric Siu: Looking at some of my data right now, it's very similar. You said yours is half a percent, right of people that are actually clicking it?

Neil Patel: Less than half a percent, everyone takes naps and stuff on there. It ranges, sometimes it's a tenth of a percent, I've gone the way up to like a fourth of a percent, but it's not that high.

Eric Siu: Mine is less than half a percent as well. If I were to say definitively if it's working or not, you could say it's working a little bit. But if I had to say yes or no, I would say probably not, so no. There's not much to add around this. Neil, you want to add anything else.

Neil Patel: No, is it worth using? Sure, if you have extra real estate why not just add it to your site. If you're going to do it don't add 20 social sharing buttons, just pick the major ones like Facebook, Twitter, maybe LinkedIn, but Facebook and Twitter are the main two.

Eric Siu: Great. That's it for today, but we want to talk about another giveaway. This is for a year annual subscription of Crazy Egg, which is Neil's heat mapping tool. Neil, what is Crazy Egg?

Neil Patel: Sure, Crazy Egg is a visual analytics tool, shows you where people click, where they don't. From there you can adjust your design to get more clicks in the area you want. You can even do things like look at a scroll map report that'll show you how far people are scrolling down and they can even see your call to action buttons. To even watching mouse recordings to see how people navigate your website and where they get stuck. You can make changes to your design and your copy elements through our wizzywig editor. You don't have to be a designer or developer. And with a few clicks of a button you can get started with AV testing.

Eric Siu: Great. If you want to get in on this one year annual subscription give away, we're doing one per week. And you can actually get multiple entries. If you want to learn more about how you can get multiple entries just go to singlegreen.com/giveaway to learn more and we'll see you tomorrow.

Speaker 1: This session Marketing School has come to a close. Be sure to subscribe for more daily marketing strategies and tactics to help you find the success you've always dreamed of. And don't forget to rate and review so we can continue to bring you the best daily content possible. We'll see you in class tomorrow, right here on Marketing School.

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