Abstract: Optimal Social Bookmarking Button Placement
Having a ‘Digg This’ or any other social media site button on your site facilitates your readers in voting for the content and consequently having your content promoted and viewed by thousands of readers. But simply having the button on your site is not enough.
Of course before the button even comes into play, your content/site must be of excellent quality and must appeal to the particular social site’s interests; and your reader-base has to be social-web savvy. Assuming that you satisfy those criteria, the placement of the social news sites’ buttons alue4!> can have a sufficient impact on what percentage of your readers actually click on the button and help promote your content.
If you are an online publisher, you are surely aware of Google’s AdSense program. And if you are diligently using the system to maximize your income, then you have definitely seen the following optimal advertisement placement graphic provided by Google:
As you can see, there are 4 degrees to which your reader sees the advertisement and how likely the reader is to click on it, red being the most visible/clickable, and white being the least. My abstract is based on the same idea of visibility to the reader. Generally, plugins that automate the button placement process, such as Sociable, put all of them at the end of the content, but you can manually change the code to relocate the buttons to anywhere else on the site.
I am trying to create a heat-map similar to the one displayed above to help people decide where to place the socially driven websites’ buttons on their service or content. If you have used these buttons on your site (especially if you have experimented with different placement locations) and have had success with content promotion, I would love to hear from you. Based on the statistics I get, I will make and distribute a free heat-map showing optimal button placement.