Some like to keep their website’s homepage clean with a Facebook and a Twitter button doing the most… while some mess it up with the buttons of almost all the possible social media websites on the planet: Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Blogpost, Google Plus, Instagram, Reddit, LinkedIn, and YouTube…
The mystery of Social Buttons
The question arises who’s doing the put-up in the right way. Messing up the homepage is in a no way an ideal choice but scarcity is sometimes disappointing for the customers. The choice of “which social media button to put” actually depends upon the type and target audience of the website although Facebook and Twitter are almost universal.
If your website is dedicated to photography and follows heavy insistence on a mobile platform, then placing requires an Instagram button is a must while a retail website dedicated to retail, DIY and fashion requires a Pinterest button. Moreover, Google Plus and YouTube buttons are used on websites featuring many videos.
The Leaders
Talking about industries, Facebook and Twitter remains the king regardless of the industry. LinkedIn as expected is has more prevalence on websites offering services, particularly IT and legal, while websites offering products are more accumulated with YouTube. One exception here is the websites of Venture Capitalists, which are more likely to have a LinkedIn button than a Facebook.
The Skeptic Leaders
Instagram buttons while available on most Fashion, Restaurant, Retail and Sports websites, they are almost absent on Finance, Software, Energy and Legal websites. The same goes for Pinterest buttons, which are unavailable on most of the Finance, software, and legal websites.
How Many Buttons Make Sense?
Another interesting finding, 20%, and 18% of all websites include three and four social media buttons respectively, which is more likely to be a Twitter followed by Facebook, YouTube and Google+.
Why Twitter?
Twitter and Facebook together represents 54% of homepage social media buttons. Twitter with user base exceeding 300M is the most loved of the buttons exceeding Facebook, which has 1B users. Twitter has a share of 27% although Facebook along with Instagram, which it acquired for billions, the stats closes to 32% share.
The Dark Horse – Google
Google is a market leader with most of its offering with Android, Google Search and Chrome being the most used mobile platform, search engine and web browser respectively. It is doing fairly bad considering the brand.
Google Plus is one such example with the chance of appearing only 11% in context to the social buttons on a website’s homepage. Even if we put together both the Google’s offering—YouTube and Google Plus, the total share remains shy of 25%.
As expected with 10% share of the social buttons, almost equal to the share of Instagram and Pinterest taken together, LinkedIn is favourite of B2C industries, exceeding Facebook in some cases.
