Social bookmarking - is there a point to all those little icons?
Published by on July 31st, 2008
I once thought they were a great addition to a website, now I’m not so sure.
Social bookmarking is a concept involving individuals sharing their favourite web pages in some form of central, public list or database. It is a great way to promote site you like, and a great way to find sites you may not have come across any other way.
To encourage adding sites and posts to these services (such as the adorably minimalist del.icio.us), I, like many, added “convenient” buttons to individual posts:
Did they increase the amount of blog pages I’ve had added to social linking sites?
Not noticeably. And here’s the reason: everyone has their favourite social linking site(s) and they are unlikely to try another. Myself, I use del.icio.us and Stumbleupon. As a user of these services, I am all geared up mentally (supported by browser buttons, etc) to add pages to them whenever I feel the urge. I do not need to be reminded of them by a clutter of little icons which I see so often that I am blanking out like an adultfinder banner ad.
Dedicated users of social bookmarking services actively use them. The rest use them so minimally that I feel a row of little icons or popup links is unlikely to suddenly spur them into action.
Have you found icon reminders about social linking services useful?
3 Responses to “Social bookmarking - is there a point to all those little icons?”
Leave a Reply
July 31st, 2008 at 12:16 pm
I think the icons have a benefit. We use them on our blog but keep it neat using sharethis.com. I agree that for people like you [and me] we don’t need these icons as we have our browsers hooked up with the buttons we need. Tools like Mahalo Follow also let you incorporate mutli posting to your various bookmarking channels which makes life even easer.
But, we are in the ‘early adopter’ category, many others don’t have this hooked up and may be using Yahoo or Google, which these tools will also cater for. You may also be travelling and not have your preferred browser hooked up. I would suggest, therefore that offering these links are more for convenience than for mass traffic generation. They shouldn’t take up to much space or bandwidth so just leave them on
August 5th, 2008 at 5:33 pm
I think one benefit is just to let the “non-early adopters” know these services exist.
Sure, it’s a slow burn, but how else do people find out about these things? If they see the digg icon enough times, the might investigate what it’s all about.
November 11th, 2008 at 5:34 am
iam sure the little icons will have benefits. Adding a comment and posting them like forums and blogs etc. And its great experence to do such things……
=================================================
john
social bookmark