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What’s With All the Buttons?

The story begins with our intrepid, but humble, Internet Marketer taking a sip of coffee one early morning and clicking on the What’s New tab in his favorite forum. He notices a thread where his more experienced forum pals are talking about how they are adding Facebook and Twitter buttons to their web pages.

He remembers reading and bookmarking some similar posts from a few weeks back and immediately starts clicking away intending to find them.

“I wouldn’t have bookmarked them if they weren’t important, would I?” he asks himself.

After 20 minutes or so of searching through various unrelated posts and notes, and happily finding that delicious sounding Cole Slaw recipe he bookmarked last summer but hadn’t seen since,  but not finding what he was looking for, he gives it up as a bad job and goes back to the forum.

As he reads more he begins to see that it (suddenly?) seems that a ‘social presence’ is now necessary. If you don’t ‘have one’ you are undoubtedly in a serious pickle. What can he do? What should he do? As he reaches for his Valium and the remote for the TV you can hear him scream, “How many new buttons should I put on my pages?”

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Is It Really That Bad?

In a word, Yes. At first blush, everyone has started putting social buttons on their site so that they can be ‘Liked’ in Facebook, Tweeted on Twitter and get seriously LinkedIn. Is that important? I thought so a few months ago.

It seems that the Panda reared it’s cute little head and at the same time Google+ came crashing out of the gate. I think a lot of people inferred some type of connection. Panda hates content farms. Panda (obviously) hates Ezine Articles. The Panda apparently didn’t like a lot of things.

But the Panda was Google’s pet wasn’t it? And Google without a doubt liked Google+. (The next Facebook killer?) So it stands to reason that Panda must absolutely adore Google+. But all Google pets do no evil. So if Panda liked Google+ it must also (nearly) equally like Facebook and Twitter and all their friends.

And before you can say Bob’s your uncle we have more buttons on our pages than an accordion in an old time polka band.

If We’re Not Sure, What Do We Do?

Two things. First, we should know what types of buttons (interactive social links) of buttons to use on our sites. And where and when to use them.

Secondly, determine the reasons why we would or would not want to add them.

The Types of Social Buttons and When and Where to Use Them

The social buttons seem to fall into three general groups:

1. Buttons that improve your existing Social Presence. These buttons increase your social standing by having you gain more Followers or Friends or otherwise add members to your group.
2. Buttons that potentially improve the ranking or traffic to your web page or site. These are the buttons where someone Tweets a link to your page or Likes it on Facebook or otherwise puts links to your pages in the traffic stream for the search engines to see as well as creating back links on the various social sites.
3. Buttons that are not technically ‘Social’ buttons the the Web 2.0 sense of the word, but are probably of the highest importance to many Internet Marketers. These are the Email and RSS Feed type buttons where you gain a user who specifically wants to received more content from you and is giving you their permission to send it to them. The king of these buttons is the “Subscribe To My List” double opt in email button that adds a new verified user to your list.