Insights

So What Happens When You Remove Your Social Sharing Buttons?

A month ago, I published a post about an experiment I was going to run – what happens when you remove social share buttons from your blog?

The gist of the experiment was simple: having run a bunch of tests through Google Analytics, it was clear that – as the direction of content here shifted – social was becoming less important a driver of traffic for me.

Don’t get me wrong – that’s not the same as saying social media has no value. Far from it. However, there’s a difference between being valuable and being a referral source.

Additionally, social share buttons – depending on how they’re coded – can actually hinder the experience of the visitor, especially if they’re on mobile browsers.

There was also the question of whether having share buttons took away attention from more important CTAs, or calls to action.

For example, would a sharer then not comment, or subscribe, if they’ve already taken the action of sharing a post?

To find out, I decided I’d remove sharing buttons for a month, and see what happens – and this was the result.

Removing Shares and the Percentage Impact on Traffic

In my post from last month, I shared what the breakdown was of the traffic here. From that post:

As you can see from the image above, social traffic counted for just under 10% of all traffic to this blog, with search by and far the leader.

Given that social networks can up and leave at any time, or make changes to the way they benefit bloggers and content providers, this wasn’t such a big issue for me.

Note: As my friend Jim Connolly advised, some “dark sharing” of posts on social media may not be reported as social traffic, and skew the numbers.

@DannyBrown Hi mate. Been doing some research this afternoon. Seems Google analytics still “thinks” traffic from Twitter / FB is “direct.
— Jim Connolly (@JimConnolly) December 12, 2015

While you can work in some campaign tricks in Google Analytic to overcome some of this, it’s a fair point by Jim.

So, for the results of the experiment, I’ll be comparing like-for-like on social traffic only, as defined by Google.

With that in mind, here’s the current breakdown of the 30 days of traffic since removing the share buttons.

Organic search – 58.1%
Direct – 24.5%
Social – 7.8%
Referral – 8.3%
Other and email – 1%

As you can see from the previous chart, organic search remained pretty consistent at around 58%. Other and email also remained consistent.

What was interesting is the rise in percentage of direct traffic along with the decline in social traffic. Especially if, as Jim mentions in his tweet, much of that increased direct traffic is from social media.

The thinking behind that is simple: if there are no share buttons on a post, it’ll either be ignored, or the URL will be copy pasted and shared directly to a network.

[bctt tweet=”Does removing social sharing buttons hinder or benefit a blog? #socialshares” username=”CraftBeersblog”]

If we think along the lines of social sharing buttons (and their ease of sharing) accounting for the social traffic in the chart, it makes sense that this section would see a decline.

However, if the increase in direct traffic is a result of manual sharing, that offers support to the argument by Sam Solomon that if people really love your content, they’ll share it.

Now, admittedly, this is as much anecdotal as it is empirical, given the way Google Analytics isn’t the greatest when it comes to slicing and dicing some of the data behind the data.

But it’s an interesting result, nonetheless, and gives a pretty good argument for anyone wondering how effective social sharing buttons are.

Removing Shares and the Actual Impact on Traffic

If the previous part of this post showed that removing sharing buttons doesn’t necessarily mean a lot percentage-wise, when it comes to actual traffic the story is a little different.

While direct is up and social is down from a percentage perspective, both have actually suffered from an actual traffic point of view, as you can see below (click image to expand).

As you can see, there are a lot of red arrows. Given, it’s not a full 30 days since the experiment, so I’ll update this post accordingly to include this one’s stats.

Regardless, it’s clear that removing buttons does impact real traffic – which, to be fair, I was kind of expecting.

After all, if you remove the ease of use to share, there’s more likelihood something won’t be shared, as Mitch Mitchell stated over on Twitter when I first started the experiment.

https://twitter.com/Mitch_M/status/675107840835624960

Note: I’d recommend clicking through to the bigger discussion around that tweet, some great thoughts and discussion points.

It wasn’t just Mitch that wasn’t a fan of the removal of sharing buttons.

I received a few emails from subscribers, as well as messages/comments on Facebook, that suggested removal of share buttons would stop some folks from sharing my posts.

Going by the stats from Google Analytics, it’d appear that they were right. Mostly.

One thing that should be mentioned is during the experiment, I closed my Google+ account. Given this used to be my #3 social referrer of traffic, some of the lost traffic can be accredited to that.

As a final comparison in share numbers, I used ShareTally to count the overall social shares in the 30 days prior to the experiment, and the 30 days without share buttons.

This is where things got a little bit interesting.

With share buttons: 392
Without share buttons: 511

This ties back to the increase in percentage of sharing manually on social. As you can see, the posts got over 100 extra shares by not having buttons.

And yet… the actual traffic from these extra shares didn’t equate to the percentage benefits.

So, What Does It All Mean?

While there can be a few reasons for this, my own belief is this – with the sharing solution I use here, I can customize the way each post is shared.

This means I can create customized tweets, encourage readers to “tweet this” with the same customized tweet, optimize images for Facebook and Pinterest, and much more.

In essence, I can make the CTA for each blog post much stronger for each of the main social networks.

As someone who crafts copy for a living, I can be a bit more creative with how the post is described, which – in turn – when shared could attract more attention.

It’s not a given that this is the case, but it’s one of the reasons I believe has impacted traffic. After all, the share numbers are still there, just not the clickthrough.

So, how the post is positioned on social can mean a difference.

Keep in mind that it was the holiday period as well, and people may not have had as much interest in reading blogs.

All that aside, I was pleasantly surprised by the positive outcomes of the experiment.

Higher percentage of manual sharing;
Increase in email subscribers between the two periods;
Increase in on-post engagement;
Increase in off-post engagement.

Given that my core goal for this blog is conversations and email “conversions” (to plan ahead for less social networks), the experiment can be classed a success.

[bctt tweet=”Who knew that removing sharing buttons can increase email subscribers and blog engagement?” username=”CraftBeersBlog”]

From more standard metrics – site traffic and social traffic – the experiment was a “failure”. And that’s okay.

The whole point of blogging is to experiment to see what works for you, and what enhances the user experience and what inhibits it.

For me, as a blogger, social sharing buttons [mostly] inhibit it (or so it would appear), given that my own goals looked to be getting met.

For the reader, social sharing buttons [mostly] enhance the experience – easier sharing, easier CTA, immediate optimization for sharing with their networks.

While I may yet remove sharing buttons altogether in the coming 12 months (I’m curious how the networks will play out in 2016), for now I’ll re-enable them again.

However, they’ll be pretty unobtrusive – sidebar floating as opposed to top and bottom of content for desktop readers, and removed altogether for mobile readers.

If the Social Warfare team is reading this post, it’d be great to have the option of what sharing solutions are active based on visitor. Perhaps a future addition?

In the meantime, I hope you’ve found this post useful for your own goals regarding social sharing options on your site – what are your thoughts regarding the future of social sharing?

The Best Decision I Made About This Blog

As the end of 2015 waves its face in front of us, it’s usually the sign for times of reminiscence, both in our personal lives as well as professional.

The same can be applied to pretty much everything we do, with blogging being one of them.

If I were to look back on where this blog has taken turns since starting it back in September 2008, there have been a lot of directional changes in that time.

There’s one, though, that stands out for me as the best decision I made about this blog’s direction – when I stopped writing primarily about social media and marketing.

Talking About People is Marketing, is Social

For the first five years or so of this blog’s life, the topics were mostly based around marketing, social media, content, and the various tools and technology that joined them all together.

This was all well and good, and helped build the blog a pretty decent following among readers looking for these kind of topics.

But there’s only so much you can say – or want to say – about marketing, or social media, or content, that isn’t being repeated ad infinitum elsewhere.

When you begin to not look forward to publishing another post, because your heart isn’t really in it, you know it’s time to either change things up, or quit.

Since I enjoy writing so much, the decision was made for me – quitting wasn’t an option, but changing direction was.

So, out went the business-specific posts, and in came the more personal ones that looked at life in the bigger picture.

Topics ranged from misogyny to ignorance;??life lessons to hopes; messed up priorities to racism; and more.

As a result, I lost many subscribers – and that’s okay, because as I mentioned in a post detailing the move, the new direction wouldn’t have been for them anyway.

However, in their place remained (and came) those looking for more personal conversations, and topics.

The level of comments, and the depth behind these comments, showed me I was right to make the move to the type of blogging that was important to me.

An interesting side effect was an increase in readers of the Millennial age group.

Given that so many social media wonks advise you to “write for the Millennials!”, I can’t help but smile at the irony of writing for myself, and attracting a new audience made up of ones that we’re meant to be targeting.

Plus ca change.

What Comes Next

For you, the readers who have stayed with me on the personal journey, I sincerely thank you. I’m glad you choose this little part of the web to hang out on, and I’ll try not to disappoint.

This blog will continue to travel down that path, and have some guest writers who I feel are a good fit for that direction.

I’m going to be experimenting in post formats next year, with some ideas I want to try with regards visual presentation – so that should be fun.

I also look forward to growing the Pure Blogging site, as more readers discover that in 2016. We have a great team of writers there now, with more to follow in 2016, so check it out.

It’s been a fun 7+ years so far – here’s to what comes next.

Cheers!

An Experiment in Removing Share Buttons Altogether

Unless you’ve been hiding under a social media rock recently, you probably know about Twitter removing their share counts.

This meant that, as of November 20, any blog posts that had some form of Twitter sharing button (native or third-party) would no longer be able to show how many times that post had been shared on Twitter.

Cue content marketers and social media sharing companies decrying the move, with dramatic quotes about it “being the death of Twitter”.

#SaveOurShareCounts Tweets

Because, yes, Twitter has nothing more serious to worry about than whether or not it shows share counts…

For the rest of us, it didn’t mean as big a deal. At the end of the day, a share count is simply one metric of a blog post’s “success”.

Given there are enough shady companies and scripts out there that can artificially inflate these numbers, it’s not even a great metric.

Personally, I’d rather go by engagement, reactions (as in discussions and thoughts elsewhere), and growth (either subscribers, readers or share of voice) as metrics that matter.

But it made me wonder – with so many people getting up in arms about a little number, what would they actually feel like if you removed the option to share via on-site buttons altogether?

And so I’m going to find out.

To Quickly Share or Not to Share

Last year, I read a post from a few other bloggers who were discussing the value of social sharing buttons, and whether they helped or hindered sites.

One of the best articles I read was from Sam Solomon, called Why I’m Done With Social Media Buttons.

Sam’s main premise was from a designer’s angle, and how sharing buttons could ruin the user experience.

Yet he also shared a couple of case studies that looked at on-page sharing, and the results weren’t great.

While he admits that he didn’t do any real conversion tracking on his own site before switching off, his points around the topic are very valid, and worth the read.

His closing argument has remained with me since reading his post:

If people really love your content, they?ll share it.

And it’s true.

Yes, having on-page buttons may make it easier – but then do they take away from other calls to action that you’re trying to achieve (comments, subscriptions, etc)?

For example, this company saw conversions increase when they removed their share buttons, which is clearly a more important metric than how many tweets they got.

But perhaps that shouldn’t come as too big of a surprise – it’s simply following the golden rule of marketing: that you have one main CTA and that’s your primary KPI (key performance indicator).

You then set secondary CTAs and KPIs based on the key one – but only if they don’t jeopardize your main one.

If you take this to your blog, your core CTA might be to get a comment. Or it might be to get a subscriber. Or to download an ebook, or something similar.

I’m going to hazard a guess that these will come before social sharing. So are we diluting our goals by the [apparent] importance on social sharing buttons?

Time to find out.

Setting 30 Days Comparable Metrics

If I look at my Google Analytics, I can see how much social traffic means to my blog.

In the last 30 days, my breakdown has been as follows:

Organic search – 58%
Direct – 22.3%
Social – 9.5%
Referral – 9%
Other and email – 1%

Just looking at that simple pie chart, I can see that – in the grand scheme of things – social isn’t a huge part of this blog’s traffic.

While 10% might mean X amount of visits, I tend to find the bounce rate (how soon someone leaves a page) higher for social traffic than search or direct.

Additionally, if I look deeper into my social analytics, I can see that both Facebook and Twitter are the key social drivers – Twitter accounts for 31% of social traffic, Facebook accounts for 29%.

That’s almost 2/3 of all my social traffic coming from just two networks.

So, truth be told, for this particular blog, maybe social isn’t a key driver of visits, even though I’ve continuously made it easier to share with ever-improved social sharing options.

Of course, the argument could be made that perhaps the content just wasn’t shareworthy. In which case, get off my lawn! 😉

One thing I do find interesting (and another reason for this experiment) is that when I look at both my Google Analytics as well as Share Tally, I can see there are a solid number of shares from Buffer and Pocket.

These are two platforms that my current social sharing solution doesn’t support – which suggests that readers are still happy to cut and paste a blog post’s URL onto their preferred platform of choice.

Well, I guess I’m about to find out.

For the next 30 days, I’m not going to enable on-page sharing for the posts I publish.

Instead, whenever a reader enjoys a post and wants to share it, they’ll need to grab the URL and paste it directly into Twitter, or Facebook, etc.

If they do, great. If they don’t, well, maybe great, maybe not – I guess we’ll see based on traffic comparisons as well as network activity.

Either way, I’m interested to see how removing share buttons impacts the shareability of this blog.

Let the fun begin!

The One Simple Reason Against Switching Off Blog Comments

A recent blog post by Arik Hanson, that looked at seven trends impacting every blogger, caught my attention the other week.

I’ve read Arik’s blog for a good few years now, and his content is always informative, and not afraid to poke the bear and challenge standard thinking when it comes to content. This blogging trends post was no different.

It covered topics like RSS being retired soon (which I agree with), the changing face of content presentation, and social sharing losing traction, amongst other things.

One trend that stood out, though, was Arik’s belief that blog comments were “officially dead”.

Based on the examples of Copyblogger and others, Arik feels that we’ll see even more content creators and blogs switch off comments in the months ahead.

That may be indeed be true – but as anyone that’s read this blog for a while will know, it’s not something I buy into, and an approach I wouldn’t recommend for one simple reason.

You Care, But You Don’t Really

Imagine you go to an event where there’s a guest speaker. You pay your dollars to attend, and you allocate a certain amount of time to be at the event.

The speaker is entertaining, the topic is something you’re interested in, and the speech gets your mind buzzing with so many follow-up ideas.

Ideas that need answers.

Ideas that only questions to the speaker can answer.

So, you wait in line after the event so you can meet the speaker, thank them for their work, and ask your follow-up question that would expand the speaker’s talk.

Finally, you get your chance to ask a question, and…. silence. A blank stare. A look that acknowledges your presence, but nothing more.

Undeterred, you ask another question. Equally undeterred, the speaker offers the same response as before.

Suddenly, you realize that it’s not just you that’s being ignored – everyone is.

Everyone that wanted to publicly thank the speaker is being ignored. Everyone who wanted to add to the topic is being ignored.

Instead, there are various rooms that are roped off where you can go instead, with the vague promise that there may be an answer or two there.

Sound familiar?

Time is Investment Too

We have a lot of distractions. Both as content creators and content consumers, there’s a hell of a lot of competition vying for our attention.

Because of that, the readers that choose to visit your little part of the web are investing in you. Sure, they may not be financially investing – but they’re investing nonetheless.

That time that could be spent elsewhere. The exchange of knowledge that could be shared elsewhere. The referral of other readers in search of somewhere they can invest too.

All of that comes from comments.

Yes, the content attracts. Yes, the content educates. Yes, the content sparks ideas.

But the content eventually draws a blank – because it’s a finite resource.

If the content on display doesn’t quite satiate the reader’s appetite, the comments after the post can. And usually do.

Because now you’re not just tied to the one-directional broadcast of the content creator – now you have the years of experience, wisdom and ?questioning viewpoints of other attendees.

Because of that, your investment is rewarded. You leave wiser, and you help others leave wiser too.

Whether the wisdom comes from extra knowledge about the topic at hand, or a new mindset about an offshoot of the topic you’d never considered, it’s return for your investment in that part of the web.

Spend Your Money Wisely

The kicker for many of the blogs that have switched off comments is the invitation to “continue the conversation elsewhere”.

This is followed by a link to that content creator’s Facebook page, or Google+ community, or Twitter stream, etc.

All well and good – after all, they’re not saying they don’t value your opinion, they just want to have it elsewhere (after all, that’s where all the cool chat is happening).

But then you land on one of these other channels, and the two-way dialogue is equally non-existent.

Instead, it’s a broadcast-fest of links to their content. You know – the very content they don’t want to talk to you about, but come to this channel you’re on now to continue the conversation…

And so the circle goes.

[clickToTweet tweet=”Switching off #blog comments doesn’t enhance a reader’s experience – it hinders it. ” quote=”Switching off blog comments doesn’t enhance a reader’s experience – it hinders it. “]

Look, I get it. As I mentioned earlier in this post, time is a commodity we have increasingly little of.

So I get that you don’t want to spend that time talking when you could just as easily be broadcasting.

Just be honest about it.

If you want to be a broadcast channel (whether that’s your blog, social network, email blast or whatever), go ahead and knock yourself out.

But let’s not pretend that blog comments are being switched off to “offer a better experience more attuned to the reader’s choice.”

Instead, if you really care about the thoughts of your readers, and the discussions they want to have, it’s a simple decision – leave the blog comments on.

And if you’re a reader/commenter, choose better places to spend your investments – there are enough of them about.

And they really do care about your investment – you can trust me on that.

The Difference Being First Off the Train

Each morning, I commute from my home in Burlington to the office where I work in Toronto, and each morning, I pretty much follow the same routine.

Because the commute is about two hours each way (I need to catch two trains because of where the office is located), I tend to have a relaxing time on the first train.

This means settling back, reading a book, looking out the window, or just sitting there, eyes closed, listening to my iPod’s “Commute” list.

When the train pulls into Toronto, I sit patiently and wait for the other commuters to get off, then make my way through Union Station to get to the TTC (the municipal transit system).

Because I’ve waited until pretty much everyone else is off, the walk through Union can be pretty crowded, as commuters from other recently-arrived trains join the throng.

But it’s a price I’m willing to pay to avoid the crush of trying to access the stairs?from platform to station upon arrival.

This morning, though, I did things a little differently – and it was like a different world.

Seeing the Same but Alternative Universes

This morning, the train I take each day was delayed, which meant that there’d be more than the usual number of people getting on at the station before mine.

So, instead of wandering upstairs as usual (because it’s the Quiet Zone, and silence is encouraged, which I love), I decided to sit at the first seat just inside the door.

I could still relax, and actually stretch my feet out because of where the seat was located, and with my headphones on, I didn’t really hear the chatter of the morning commute.

It was when I reached Union Station that everything changed.

As the train pulled in, I stood up and waited at the door to get off. When the doors opened, it was a clear path to the stairs – no crowd, no pushing to get closer to the door, nothing.

Simply a short walk to the stairs and down I went.

When I entered Union Station itself, I wondered if the train had taken a detour to a little suburban station, it was so quiet!

Whereas normally I’m just part of a bigger crowd all trying to find our place in the goal of getting out without injury, this morning I maybe saw about 30 people between leaving the train and exiting the station onto Front Street.

Oh, I knew the crowd was still there – but now they were behind me, out of reach and out of my way. The difference was staggering.

Even when I exited onto Front Street, the difference continued.

No throbbing mass of people moving in one coordinated sardine can of walking. No bumping into strangers (or being bumped into). No angry looks as you nip in front of someone just to avoid being pushed along a direction you didn’t want to travel.

It was a weird experience. The surroundings were the same, but the interactions were anything but.

And it was glorious.

We Don’t Always Have to Be First, But Sometimes It’s Nice

Of course, once I hit the TTC, everything was back to normal, and the crush of the rush was on again. So much for my calm sojourn from the previous five minutes.

But riding the TTC to the office made me think of the early morning experience and what it meant in the bigger picture.

You see, often we leave all the movement to others, and we’ll just go along for the ride, happy to be involved.

We see bloggers we want to emulate, so we post vacuous content that we think is like theirs, but in truth is a pointless exercise – because that blogger’s already done it.

We see brands we want to ride the coattails of, so we come up with lazy content and advertising that’s a second-rate copy of what could have been.

We see people on social networks sharing their perfect lives, and we try and compete in a competition that can never be won, because it’s a facade of what’s really their everyday lives.

In short, we don’t take the first step and enjoy that moment on our own and all that brings, because we’re so used to the so-called wisdom of the crowd and the places that might take us (but rarely does).

As actor and playwright Harvey Fierstein once said,

It’s a wonderful world. You can’t go backwards. You’re always moving forward. It’s the wonderful part about life. And that’s terrific.

How we choose to move forward is where we create the adventure.

We can go with the crowd and see where that takes us. And there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that – I’ve yet to fail to make it to my office because of flowing with the crowd. I may be a little late, but I’ll get there.

Or, we can stand up once in a while and be the one that gets off the train first, and see what it’s like to lead.

The clarity. The wide open path ahead. The choice of taking steps A, B or C today, because no-one else has reached them yet.

We don’t always have to be first. But it’s nice to not have to worry about the crowd, and the direction it’s moving, now and again.

Try it sometime. You never know what might happen.