How to get the share button into the user world again

Most of today's Web sites join the social-sharing button function, and the speed is fast. Perhaps they all feel that users will be happy to share what they see on the site to friends, family or co-workers. Take Facebook, Pin, G, and Twitter as examples, theoretically providing users with a fast, seamless content-sharing experience, while also helping search engine optimization to a certain extent, and you can link search content from other sites to your own site.

But the above function depends on how you implement the button, they are not simple-just think of a bunch of social-sharing buttons when you move your mouse over a blank space. Several of my customers have done some usability testing to try to understand how much users need this button. Finally, the conclusion is that user sharing depends on the quality of the content and the user's own internet habits.

I recently held a 500-person user experience Seminar in Lisbon, Australia, where both the user experience and the interactive design team were involved, and I asked both participants to raise their hands and to indicate in which of the following situations they clicked the share key:

A share link provided by a stock agent website that provides a button to share with your partner

The travel site offers a holiday advertising package for your friends to share

An article that shares the user experience that you share with your peers

A very cool game is you see, whether to click to share to your friends

Have just finished reading a good book, whether to share a wonderful paragraph for a friend

On the internet to see a spoof pictures to share with friends

The feedback from the participants was very good at validating our previous online findings: targeted, serious, commercial content, the vast majority of users will choose to copy part of the text and URL in the email, the following figure is intuitive outline of this result, a small number of users will click the "Email sharing" button to jump.

On the biased and entertaining websites, the respondents changed a lot: they would give priority to social media-sharing buttons such as Facebook Share, like, etc. to share pictures or photos they saw.

We also made a usability test for a group of social buttons for a financial services company and a retail travel agency. This is a qualitative study, but the test results were very much in line with our expectations, interestingly, eight of the 12 travel sites said they might click on Facebook's "like" or send a holiday deal page, but as the investigation went deeper, only four of them would confirm that they did click on Facebook's The like button or forwarded information about the site.

Then analyze the insurance products. How much do users want to share your product with their family or mistresses? Fortunately, all respondents said they would use the social sharing button, and one user concluded, "If only one person is interested, I will use the email button." "Another user said," If this product I want people to understand, usually use email to share useful content. ”

But what about search engine optimization? According to SEO experts (at least I'm not), these social-sharing buttons are included in their ranking algorithm. This means that the more you share your site's content in theory, the higher the rankings will be in search engine results.

However, there is still a problem unresolved: is the chicken first or the egg? In the eldest, Dr. Pete's article, "Social Information driven traffic," mentioned: Whether it is the Facebook "like" button to import page browsing, or the content of the page to drive the "like" button, or some of the complexity of the factors in the "like" button and independent page traffic? No matter what the answer is, Finally I found the Smashing magazine an interesting microblog: they removed the Facebook share button and the flow increased. The reason is simply that the articles that have been shared appear directly in the Facebook timeline of these people, which is called "traffic is a loan or not."

Here's what I've concluded based on a sample survey, which requires a lot more research to verify:

1. You need to balance the relationship between search engine optimization and user experience.

As a user researcher, I certainly prefer the importance of user experience, and if users get a better experience, they are more likely to explore ways to share content.

2. Let all the sharing process become simple and convenient.

Long URLs can easily be lost when the message sharing, of course, there are short link tools available, but such conditions are obviously not applicable to the vast number of small white users.

I love the share buttons on the JC Penny website below the product picture, and users can easily point to the FB, Twitter, and even printers that these buttons represent. A lot of websites are always not put button side of the place, such as a long text, share button at the bottom ...

The product promotion by email recommendation is another commendable promotion, as Aldi's product page does, allowing users to share and generate intuitive e-mail forms that are easy to use for users who do not know how to copy and paste URLs.

3. Make sure that your share button is sophisticated and context-docking

Only the right place to share the button to ensure that this is the user has the willingness to share, which is particularly important for the product page. Don't distribute the shared buttons on every page of the site.

Related: Do not let other junk buttons fill the entire site, this will only make the site of the whole miscellaneous pages.

Don't let it appear at the top of the page, give you some poor users to read a short paragraph before deciding whether to share, put all the buttons on the face is tantamount to let users ignore them.

Amazon's social network includes a lot of sharing options, each set is very sophisticated and clear, and users will have the urge to click.

4. "Focus on high quality content and user experience".

This is a cow from the singals of Panax Notoginseng to see, although the old but not yet ineffective, can be a good summary.

So use the "please vote Me" button carefully. This compulsive button is easy to hate, added a lot of irrelevant visual interference, and the site also looks very low-grade, the actual conversion effect is very suspicious, on the contrary, focus on the provision of content improvements, if you do so, people will naturally consider how to share it.

Via Uxmag