Each blogger wants to reach a larger audience with their blog, regardless of how many readers they currently have. Social media sites present one of the best opportunities for bloggers to expand their reach.
Bloggers can devote their time in different ways in order to get better results with social media (writing new blog posts, networking with other social media users, etc.), but one thing that tends to get some easy results is to use recognized social media icons and voting buttons on the blog.
The voting buttons and icons that you use on your blog serve as a reminder and a polite request to your visitors to vote for you. The buttons make it faster and more convenient, which usually means more votes.
How Not to Use Social Media Voting Buttons
Because voting buttons, widgets and icons can encourage votes and lead to more visitors through social media, many bloggers tend to overdo them. You will see blogs with voting buttons for every possible social media site you can image.
This approach does more harm than good. The buttons will clutter up your blog, make it look unprofessional, distract readers from the content, and most importantly, it could spread the votes that you receive to the point where they don’t have an impact.
For example, lets say you are using 20 different voting buttons on your blog and each one gets one vote from a reader. This isn’t enough to get any kind of traffic to your site. But if you were to use two different voting buttons and get ten votes with each, you may be able to get some traffic from that.
By using fewer icons/buttons you can indicate to visitors which social media sites are the most important ones for you. If you’re using too many buttons it can be confusing and they have no idea where you would most like to receive the votes.
Ways to Use Social Media Icons
The best approach is to only use about two or three buttons on your blog to produce maximum results. Pick the sites that you target based on how well they match up with your blog’s audience, as well as their potential to send visitors to your blog.
For most blogs, especially those with smaller audiences, it is not a good idea to only target the major social media sites like Digg and Reddit. You’re more likely to have success with smaller social media sites, so try to find a niche site that you can target in addition to a major site.
Depending on your audience and their familiarity with social media, you may want to explain to them what social media is, and how they can vote for your site. For audiences that are not tech-savvy, you may only have a few readers that use social media, but if you introduce the others to specific sites, they may become users and vote for your content.
