Are Social Networking Sharing buttons still important for getting traffic from social networks?

[froggyboy604]

I think social networking sharing buttons for Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit are not as important these days because there are social networking sharing web browser extensions for people to easily share website links on social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit. Some smaller third-party web browsers even have social networking share buttons built-into the browser.

There are also now more desktop programs and mobile apps for Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, and other social networks which visitors can easily use to share links, and articles on a website.

I read online that social networking share buttons can slowdown the page loading time of a website, and make visitor's use more of their expensive mobile data, so you end up annoying mobile users with long page load times, bandwidth usage, and slowdown problems.

Social sharing buttons' images, and scripts which increase your website load times may also lower your search engine rankings in Google, Yahoo, Bing, and other search engines because some search engines put faster loading websites at higher search keyword positions for keywords like "gaming, video games, and television."

But, social sharing buttons could be important if you run a celebrity gossip, teenager lifestyle, large forum, or news website with a lot of visitors who maybe more likely to use social networking share buttons.

 

[IntoxNitram]

I would say they are still important in general, people are lazy - so the less effort someone has to make to share your site, the more likely they are to do it. The mass market likely will not have these social sharing plugins for their browser and therefore having them on the site makes people more aware and more likely to share.

 

[froggyboy604]

I think it is important to pick which social networking sites your visitors, and members are more likely to use, so you don't have too many social buttons which can slow down a site, the visitor's browser, and make a site look messy.

I think Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, and Reddit are now the most important social networks which web visitors are most likely to use to share website links. LinkedIn may also be important if you run a forum about a certain job like computer programming, graphic design, web design, web development, etc.

 

[Demon_Skeith]

I've never viewed them important other than showing popularity.

 

[froggyboy604]

I've never viewed them important other than showing popularity.

I agree, social networking buttons are useful for showing the popularity of something if they have a counter on them showing how many people have used them to share something on Facebook, Twitter, and other sites.

 

[lb]

I think they are still important because clicking an icon is easier than copying a link, going to your facebook account, pasting it and submitting it...

 

[Empire]

Definitely important. It's the major source of traffic. My website has bottom and buttons of social networking that feeds posting across the networks.

Yet again I'm not getting any god damn new signings at all. Becoming dead. SEO working in a bit of a way.. Still nothing. Crap social media outlets