How often have you visited a web page seen those social media icons for Twitter, Facebook, Stumble Upon, Digg, etc.? While they were rare at first, they are now prevalent on most web sites. So what purpose do they really serve?
There is far more to your online presence today than just a web site. Individuals now have blogs which allow them greater flexibility and freedom to update their content more frequently. Now add to the that the fact that you can tweet about what you’re doing, and/or update your status as often as you like, and your reach out into the world wide web universe is even greater.
If you’re going to all the trouble to manage your information in two, three, or more places, you want people to be able to see all that information. Thus, by putting an icon on your page that allows a visitor to simply “click” to find you on Facebook or Twitter is a plus. Yet, social media icons and their usage is far more than that.
Social media icons are not only used for directing people to your other locations on the web, they are used to let visitors share your blog page with others. How often have you seen this?
This set of icons allows someone to log into their own Twitter or Facebook account, or even make a PDF of the page, and then share it with others. This is one of the best ways to get your content distributed to even a broader group of potential customers or clients (without you doing a lot of the work).
There are two issues you or your page visitors may face when using these icons:
Non-Uniqueness.
How many times have you seen a logo for something so often that now you simply overlook it whenever it appears? That’s what happens when everyone uses the same social media icons on their web site. For example, here is an image of a standard set of social media icons that you will typically come across on a web site:
There’s nothing unique or special about these. Thus, when you see them on a blog page, you may not even see them. However, what if they looked something like those shown below? Would you notice them a bit more?
Identifier.
Do you know right off the top of your head what sites these social media icons match up with?
From left to right, they are Delicious, Flicker, and Stumbleupon. Considering there are (at last count) over 50 social media icons, it can be a plus having an icon that includes the name. Another benefit of including the identifying name is that it allows someone to know what other locations there are on the web to both find and distribute information.
Remember: the goal on the web is to have your blog or web site anywhere and everything to garner traffic.
Custom social media icons are a very inexpensive way to add some power to your blog or site. It only takes one person to share your site with a few friends to give your business a nice boost.
Contact Premium Web today to have your custom social media icons designed. They’re just $20 each.
Glennette Goodbread, Owner
Premium Web Design and Hosting
