Social Bookmark Popularity – What Share Buttons Work for You

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Social bookmarking has taken a turn in the last couple of months. Back in 2008 almost every website & blog were devising newer ways to build in fancy social bookmarking buttons.

Technorati, Digg & StumbleUpon buttons ran on almost every website & blog. But with Twitter & Facebook gaining popularity in 2009 as an alternative social bookmarking tool, the others have taken the back seat.

Here on Pro Media Blog we experimented with the effectiveness of some of the very frequently seen social networking websites. The objective was to find which social sharing buttons should we continue to retain on our websites & which social networking sites are no longer effective.

Here are the results on the effectiveness & popularity of some of the social bookmarking buttons on a couple of our websites:

Social Bookmarking Buttons that are Very Likely to Be Clicked by Readers

• Tweetmeme
• Twitter Retweet
• Facebook Sharing
• Yahoo Buzz

Click rates were 60% or more for these buttons compared to the rest of the ones we put up on the same posts & pages.

Social Bookmarking Buttons that have Moderate Likelihood of Being Clicked

• Technorati
• Digg
• StumbleUpon

Click rates were 20% or less for these buttons compared to the rest of the ones we put up on the same posts & pages.

Social Bookmarking Buttons that will Possibly Never be Clicked

• Del.icio.us
• Reddit
• Newsvine
• Plurk

Click rates were negligible (less than 2%) for these buttons compared to the rest of the ones we put up on the same posts & pages.

Positioning the Social Bookmarking Buttons for Effectiveness

The second parameter in our experiment to find the effectiveness of the social networking buttons was to find which location caused the most clicks.

Of the various 4 corners of the post, the top left proved to be the most effective location. We had over 30% more clicks on the social bookmarking buttons that were positioned on the top left corner of the post.

Our experiment were conducted mostly on the technology related websites but could we safely extend the findings to any blog in general?

1. Have you had any different experience with the effectiveness of any specific bookmarking button – shape, size, colors or location?
2. Which Social Bookmarking Buttons worked for you?

Let us know.