28 Aug Social Sharing – Do You?
YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google Plus, etc, etc, etc. So we all know social media, some use it some don’t. Love it or hate it, have an opinion or don’t – the choice is yours. That said even if you hate it and feel your brand has no use for social media, it never hurts to make it easier for your users to share your content using social platforms.
That being said I think a lot of the solutions being used are crass and to be honest a little like the Daz Ads of the internet. Don’t get me wrong I’m all for overt in your face, simple calls to action, but you need a dash of subtlety in your sharing. So I redeveloped my site a little while back using HTML5, integrating new animation and going back to my roots as a Flash developer. Moving my site from the ordinary to the well not extra-ordinary, but we’ll say eye catching.
The next step was a social share widget, simple yeah – add some buttons let people share the content, spread the word, help with SEO, so you see the trend, I want to enable the spread of my content. But I said to myself “No – I’m not lobbing a load of nasty widgets and logos into this new design – it will ruin it!”. I need something a little more classy, simple but effective, so here goes, introducing the new social share widget.
A Subtle Call to Action
So I though to myself while researching this; no gaudiness, no massive click here buttons, basically nothing nasty and ugly. A simple little unobtrusive graphic, that leads to something with a little more wow factor than you standard sharing widget. You can see the working version on the right of this and every page on the site, if you clicked the image just to the right there you have failed the test 🙂
The Expanded Sharing View
Once this link is clicked, the share panel ‘lighboxes’ in and takes focus, allows the user to see where they are sharing and they get a little bit of wow with there share. Don’t get me wrong I’m not going to win any Nobel Prizes, but hey it works for me. The real one is to your right, give it a click and hopefully a share or two 🙂
