Digg This?

Take a look down at the bottom of this post.  See all those little icons?  You may know what they are for, you may not, but they are a feature that now appear on most blogs and an increasing number of Web sites.  The idea is that you can click one of those icons and, by doing so, submit a link to this post to the associated social networking site.  Why would you want to do this?  If you don’t know the answer to that question then I would suggest that there is no reason at all to do so.  But if the question you are pondering on is whether you should add these kinds of links to your Web site or blog, then by all means read on.

These icons are not merely shortcuts to the sites that the represent, they actually perform an action associated with the function of that site.  As such, they are more like little applications than links, per se.  I’d say that there are three main reasons to put an application-like shortcut to anything, social network or otherwise, on your website:

1. To give your visitors a quicker way to accomplish something they already do
2. To demonstrate that you are the kind of site that does this sort of thing
3. To educate your users and try to get them to start doing something about which didn’t already know

Let’s look at an example: The RSS icon is there so that people who already subscribe to RSS feeds can quickly add your feed to their aggregator, but it is also there to simply let people know that you have an RSS feed.  So the RSS feed icon accomplishes both #1 and #2.  How about #3?  Sure, if they don’t know that the cool little orange icon or the letters “RSS” existed before, then they do now.  But do they have any idea what they mean?  An icon is a terrible way to educate; There just isn’t enough information contained in an icon to tell someone how to do something new.

Social networks are trickier.  With the RSS icon, you are giving your visitors an additional way to receive content that you feel is important.  Now you are asking your users to help promote your content.  And not to just share with a few friends, but to promote your site to thousands of other people.  And who are those people you’re asking your users to promote you to anyway?  More about that later.

What is a social network anyway?  And how will it fit in with your overall strategy?  These are huge questions that I’ll just sort of ignore.  Easier to determine–and something I can now instruct you to do for yourself–is to learn the difference between Digg, Reddit, Facebook, Twitter, and StumbleUpon. Take some time to familiarize yourself with the networks and sites you are considering pointing your users to.  Check out which types of links rise to prominence on the networks you are interested in as well as both the tone of the conversations that result around submissions and the types of people engaging.  Don’t add a “Digg this!” link to all your pages simply because you know that Digg is the biggest and most active social networkout there.  Take a look at Digg and ask yourself if your message fits in there.  It may not.

I would suggest that in nearly every case you are going to be best served by an “email this page to a friend” link and providing a very quick way to accomplish it, but since we’re talking about social networking let’s assume that your heart is absolutely set on adding some links to enable or encourage your users to submit your content to a social network.  Let’s face it, that item #2 in the list up there is hard to get around.  All the Web 2.0 kids are doing social networking these days and if you don’t have those icons (icons = cool) on the pages of your site then people might think that you’re not all forward-y thinking.

Who are your users?  Are they even the kind of people who use social networks?  Have they ever submitted a link to one of these networks before?

Don’t know the answers to these questions?  Maybe you could run a poll on your site for a few weeks and see what your visitors say about their use of social networks.  While you’re at it, check your site’s server logs.  If you have any incoming links from social networks then add shortcut icons specific to those networks.  Also, try to discover who the user was who submitted the links you see in your logs and reach out to them.

Most members of online social networks will never submit anything to the network.  They use it to discover interesting things and rarely participate in the discussions, much less submit something themselves.  After all, it takes work to gain the status you need on a site like Digg or Reddit to get your submissions noticed.

Let’s say that some of your people actually are submitters to social networks.  People who submit links to Digg, Reddit, or one of the other commonly used social networks likely already have a method of doing this, and an icon on your pages is unlikely to help them do so.  Most social networks provide a shortcut that people can add to their browser enabling them to quickly grab a link and some content and begin the submission process.  If, on the other hand, your users are not already regular submitters then it is highly unlikely that their link submission will pick up any traction at all on the social network in question and provide you with any benefit whatsoever.

Looking at some visitor stats from a few client sites who use these types of links, less than 1% of visitors engaged with the social networking shortcuts.  While any traffic is good traffic, it would appear that the value of those visits is lower with what looks to be an increased bounce rate of about 15%.  On the other hand, that’s a pretty decent percentage of visits from social networking sites given the number of people who had used the tool bar to submit the link in the first place.  We can’t necessarily assume a correlation without additional analysis, but it looks decent enough at first glance.

If it sounds like this post is sounding like I’d recommend against adding social network icons to your pages, then that’s partly true and partly (and I do apologize for this) “IT DEPENDS.” In most cases (revisiting the list at the beginning of this post) you will really only be accomplishing #2 and demonstrating to your users that you are the kind of site that participates in Web 2.0-type things.  If this is something you want to communicate, then there certainly isn’t any harm in doing so.

I think it’s a very specific type of content that is successful on sites like Digg and I doubt that most of the organizations we work with would see much from adding this functionality to their sites.  And while the cost of doing so is very, very low, it does add clutter and noise to your pages and I can say with near certainty that one of the first things you said when we (or whoever designed your site) asked for some things that came to mind when you thought about what you wanted your site to “feel” like was “clean and clear…uncluttered.”  Honest, you said that!  I heard you!  Wait a minute…I’ve got it written down here somewhere.

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