On Social Bookmarking Icons…

You’ve seen them. “Digg this post!”, “Save to Del.icio.us!”, “Add to Technorati Favorites”. The question is:Â What’s the best way to utilize them on your blog?

On some blogs, you’ll see a strip of icons like this:

On others (like this one), we use a WordPress plugin called Share This. The plugin reduces icon clutter by stashing all of the social bookmarking links into a hidden <div>. When you click the Share This button, a dropdown menu opens with all of the links. It looks sort of like this:

I’ve been using Share This for awhile now, so I don’t have an overload of those pesky icons, but here’s my question: Is it better to use Share This, or just pick 5-6 social bookmarking icons to include? Share This makes things easier for you to save the current page to all of the major sites, or even through email. The only problem is, it’s less noticeable than having a row of icons. So, which do you think is better? Tell us why in the comments.

  • http://www.justsoftwaresolutions.co.uk Anthony Williams

    I don’t use any icons — I prefer to use words instead (e.g. Digg This).

    It depends on your audience. Some people will know that “Share This” means “submit to a social bookmarking site”, and other’s will not know what it means and ignore it. The same applies to the icons — even regular users might not recognize the icons for their favourite social bookmarking site.

    “Share This” also involves an extra click, which can be sufficient to mean people don’t bother.

  • http://www.webmaster-source.com Matt

    You use text links for social bookmark submissions? I suppose that makes sense, but I prefer the other personally. Maybe it would be a good idea to put the Share This link, and a couple of the bigger sites like Digg and StumbleUpon?