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How Many Social Networks Do You Reference on Your Website
I am a member of quite a few social networks. Surely not as many as most of the bloggers I read, but quite a few. I prefer to stick to the big guys (Digg, StumbleUpon, Delicious, etc), but do have some presence on smaller first tier social sites, second tier social sites, and ever a few n-tier social sites where n seems to be approaching infinity. Heck, I even have started using twitter more. All social sites have their collection of icon’s for promoting content (and thus their sites). Which brings me to the point of my post…
I just read a post about SEO and social networks via a link in Mixx. The article itself was fine, save for some grammatical errors (but given that I am prone to grammatical errors I can’t say a whole lot). It was a quick read, and re-iterated a chunk of things I already believe (and some I don’t). Instead of the text of the article grabbing my attention though, the thing that struck me on the page though was the sheer number of social media links in the content area of the page.
The following is a screen capture of the social networking list at the bottom of the post:
So what do I see here:
- 28 icons to save the page url
- 16 icons to share the page
- a Yahoo buzz up link
- a Digg link
- a Sphinn link
- a Reddit link
Now I’m not here to say this is wrong on the part of newbornbusiness.com, because their usage of these icons is prevalent across a large number of blogs. I’m more questioning when enough is enough? At what point do these icons and social network links just become invisible to users, kind of a banner blindness of the 21st century? Agreed, if you click the ShareThis link on the bottom of this post, you will see a full list of social networks. I prefer this less obtrusive design, although as I set here now, I wonder which more effective (a test for another day).
Trust me, I get the importance of social networks from an SEO, marketing, and general visibility point of view. I just don’t know how visible something can be when it is visible to the point of distraction.
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