Click these buttons; or else.

In doing a really quick survey of a couple websites and different blog entries, I've stumbled upon something that I find to be rather interesting. It's the whole adding the Twitter and Facebook buttons at the bottom of an entry feature. While that's wonderful and great (making it easier for the reader to pass along whatever unique and profound words you have to say), there's another feature that I find to be more discrediting at times, which would be the showing the live number of actual tweets and likes.

Here are some examples...

Obviously, the top two are from the same website, and the others are from other sites. The first two are fairly recent; about 2 days ago. The middle one is from about a week ago, and the last two are from  roughly a month ago. 

One issue I delved into is popularity of certain social networking sites. Clearly Twitter is the winner from these examples, which makes sense, seeing as how Twitter is a phenomenally fast growing site. In looking at several sites I frequent, I've yet to find more "likes" than "tweets" on any particular entry. So for someone who isn't up to speed yet on the social networking bandwagon, I'd highly suggest hopping on the Twitter wagon first. Facebook has it's advantages, but Twitter is quick and painless to start up and simple to maintain. I won't even mention Digg.

An interesting bit of information I discovered is the actual numbers. You could deduce from just simply looking at the pictures above, that the top two come from a rather popular website, the middle from a semi-popular site, and the bottom two from a rarely seen blog. But is that really the case? Are some posts just more interesting than others? Are they written in a more cleaver fashion? Or are the readers of one blog more or less lazy than the readers of another? Who's to say really? You can't really judge content based of the outside numbers. Or can you?

I came upon the thought of putting these numbers up on your blog. If you know you have a lot of readers, having this up may encourage more people to read: "Oh look at how many people tweeted and liked this! This must be a great article!". But having low numbers consistently across several posts could deter potential readers:  "Hmm, only 5 tweets and 3 likes? I'll pass...". This is why the blog you are reading right now only has the buttons and not the numbers because I know I don't get a lot of traffic. 

Now these could be just erroneous judgements and hastened observations and I could be wrong. But it's just what I've found, and if you don't like it, don't click those buttons down there.

Be well,