Mon 15 Oct 2007
Are Social Network Bookmark/Voting Plugins Useless?
Blurb by ShaunzoI don’t know but mine are gone. I’ve played about with a few but apart from the fact that they normally look ugly as fuck and slow down download times, I’ve decided that they don’t fit my blog.
I know I never use these plugins to bookmark fuck all. I normally do my voting on the social network I’m visiting.
For my bookmarking site of choice, I usually have a Firefox plugin to do everything for me. I wonder how many people actually use them. I know, amongst others, Andy uses them on niche marketing, but are they actually of any use to people, apart from promoting the actual social network?
Perhaps I’m making a mistake. Another test.
October 15th, 2007 at 6:29 am
The larger buttons with counts are certainly used by people, Sphinn, Bumpzee, PlugIM - when I had Digg as well, that was used, but it took so many Diggs to get anywhere that it didn’t seem worth using, as it detracted from other sites.
People tend to only bookmark on one site, so you split your votes.
I might experiment with adding the Digg button back soon, but only after I have made changes such that content loads before the buttons.
The Antisocial buttons are used - I have seen peeople click them to submit to Digg in my stats - not everyone is using plugins in Firefox.
October 15th, 2007 at 9:46 am
The ones that display the number of votes are awful ‘cos you tend to end up with a load of really low / 0 vote articles unless you have a very popular blog and first time visitors may then be put off from reading your articles.
October 15th, 2007 at 10:51 am
Cheers for the comment Andy, I don’t suppose you track such clicks etc?
I’m considering a slightly new strategy.
If I write anything worthwhile that gets Sphinned, or indeed I get sued, I’ll publish my Sphinn cast widget for the duration of the popularity of the story.
Or if something is popular on Digg, I’ll publish my widgets. Perhaps.
I’ll keep them on my other sites at the moment and test this out on here.
October 15th, 2007 at 10:55 am
Well I have just published definitive stats that most of my subscriptions to Google Reader come from clicks on the Google Reader subscription button.
The number of Diggs I receive for articles in the last 2 months have dramatically decreased, yet my subscribers have doubled.
April 23rd, 2008 at 1:10 pm
I think I won’t be using them. Just not had much luck with them…..