Sticking social buttons – Facebook, Twitter and social bookmarking icons – at the peak of articles can help spread your content organically, and also help with universal SEO. Too many of them and your website can create to look messier than a Yahoo toolbar from the early 2000′s.
Too many choices can also dilute the force of the most significant platforms. Here, we take a look at the most well-liked social buttons, explaining our decision process when selecting the significant buttons to use on our casino portal website, roulette.co.uk.
Facebook
With over 1.1 billion users and including, Facebook is by far the most widely used social networking device. It is also the platform that sees the highest levels of appointment by active users. While some users might have fears about sharing gambling-related content via this platform (due to the likelihood that family members and employers might see it), the sheer weight of numbers makes the choice to include a Facebook ‘like’ button a no-brainer.
Twitter
Twitter is the second most well-liked social platform, with over 500 million users, 200 million of which can be considered ‘active’. It’s a much more open method of communication than Facebook, as users can ‘follow’ whoever they want, rather than the close-knit, exclusive personal networks optimistic by Facebook. This makes it a very effective platform for sharing and spreading content, so we felt that including a Twitter button was a must.
Google+
Google claims that their social platform now has 343 million ‘active’ users, making it the fastest-growing social network on the web. Just how active these users in reality are is questionable, as the levels of engagement among these users is a lot lower than with Facebook and Twitter. There are lots of people with Google+ accounts, as extensions of their other Google accounts (Gmail, YouTube, Google Drive etc), but not many of these visit the Google+ homepage on a usual basis to check their news feed.
On the other hand, the Google ‘+1’ button seems to be very helpful from an SEO view, as recent changes to Google’s search ranking algorithm prioritise social shares – particularly on their own service. Because the online casino business is still very search-oriented, we felt that the SEO advantages of a Google+ button made it worth including. However, if we were in another line of business that was mainly driven by social marketing, we might have thought twice about using it.
LinkedIn
This is a button that we had to give a little more thought to. Because LinkedIn is mainly a business-oriented social platform, we were unsure about how suitable it would be, or how much visibility would actually be gained by people sharing content on it. It’s not, generally speaking, a platform that people use as a source of activity or links to interesting articles, certainly not in the way that Facebook and Twitter are. Most users joined the network for the purposes of job hunting, recruiting, and keeping in touch with business networks.
The most attractive statistic, from the perspective of a casino website, was that 12% of LinkedIn users seek gaming information online, as opposed to the average of 7% for other social networks. However, this doesn’t necessarily mean that those people are using LinkedIn to find this information, as the vast bulk of traffic for gambling-related websites still comes through search engines and banner ads. So while we decided against it on space grounds, we might well decide to include a LinkedIn button in future.
StumbleUpon / Digg / Delicious
A few years ago, it seemed as if social bookmarking services might actually take off as a way for people to share and meet new content on the internet. However, the whole concept never really took off on a large scale, as people seem more interested in what their Facebook and Twitter connections are recommending.
The use of these widgets has declined sharply over the last year, which has coincided with the rise of Google+ and Pinterest, telling that bloggers and webmasters are getting rid of social bookmarking buttons to make room for these.
However, with most users being indisposed to share gambling-related content via social platforms, the relative anonymity of these services can still be a highly effective driver for additional traffic to websites such as ours. For that reason, we’ve sustained to use the StumbleUpon social widget, although we might review the situation in the near future if usage continues to refuse.
Reddit
Reddit is successfully an online magazine consisting of web-sourced content voted for by its readers. It has a comparatively small (compared to Facebook) but very excited following, with its 69.9 million users reading 4.8 billion pages every month. However, from looking at the type of articles that are highly visible on Reddit, we felt that their relatively user base was unlikely to hold casino-related content, and that the inclusion of a Reddit button would only clutter the space above or below our articles.
Pinterest
According to Alexa rankings, Pinterest is the 42nd busiest site in the world, and like other fast-growing social media outlets, it is being gradually more used for business and marketing purposes. However, it seems to have a very specific audience, with 82% of users being female, and their primary benefit being hobbies and crafts, interior design, and fashion, which fits in well with the format of the site. For these reasons, we felt that users were unlikely to respond to or share our content via this service, so on balance we decided that a ‘Pin It’ button was not mainly appropriate to our content marketing needs.
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