Good Afternoon, Social Rabbit here with your guide to the world of social media.
A new chart out from Marketing Sherpa shows the buttons that companies add to their email newsletters to get people to share the content. No huge surprises that the winner is Facebook, as per the graph below. Considering that Facebook is the most widely used social network it should be up there.
Twitter with 88% of companies adding it is to me rather surprising, partly because there are only about 200 million people using Twitter (only you say!). Of these 42% have 1-5 people following them and about 24% have no one following them, leaving about 68 million people with over 5 followers, or as Mashable found Twitter reaches about 10% of internet users. Just because people have heard about Twitter doesn’t mean that they are using it or even just looking at it. But on the other hand tweets do appear in Google real time search results which non-Twitter users can see, which may lead to people coming back to your website….
Whereas LinkedIn has 100 million users, with an average of about 65 million visiting the site every month and yet only 47% of companies have added the LinkedIn share button to their enewsletters. It’s interesting isn’t it? I would have thought it would be more, but maybe we still all have Facebook Fever?!?
Now that I’ve seen this I think that I should be adding the LinkedIn share button to my newsletters (and website) to encourage more sharing of content. It is particularly relevant because Social Rabbit is a B2B (business to business) business, therefore if the articles appear on LinkedIn it helps spread the word about the business to people who I want to reach. Whereas for my Mocks business adding a LinkedIn button wouldn’t be as much benefit because it is a B2C (business to consumer) business, and I want to reach people where they have fun, rather than at work, which is how I see LinkedIn vs. Facebook.
You can go button crazy on your website and newsletters, but is this a good idea? Well as usual there is no one definitive answer to this. It depends on your audience, your buttons and your content. However, there are people who “poo poo” sharing buttons - Chris Coyer writes that they take up valuable real estate and people will copy and paste links to share anyway, but with over 100 comments on his thoughts it is obviously a contentious issue!
The only way to know if sharing buttons are going to work for your business is to actually give them a try. I would say from my perspective that yes, they are worth having, making it easy for people to share content is half the battle to getting your content spreading. But where you want them to share it eg Facebook, Twitter etc depends on your content and your audience. Also remember that sharing depends on having good content to share. If your content is not being shared seriously look at it. Tell me honestly is it something that you would share if you hadn’t written it? If you can’t do that then choose a very honest friend (or ask me) to give their opinion.
This bunny is bouncing off to look at the LinkedIn buttons in more detail…. what are you going to do differently?
