5 Questions to Ask before installing a Social Share Plugin
Bloggers, businesses, E-commerce, forums; social share plugins are used everywhere on the internet. With time, social share plugins have made their way to every technology.
Social share plugins allow integrating social share buttons on different elements of the website.
Social share buttons are mostly used in blogs; business and personal. But why businesses are using share buttons? Well, Content marketing is the answer !.
Anyways, not going into benefits and marketing, let’s talk about social share plugins. Social9 was originated out of the strong will of maintaining some core values and pushing it into the product and that’s what made our plugins different from others and yes they are free too.
Since then and now, the questions which lead to the inception of social9 are unchanged. What should I look for in a social sharing plugin?
So here are 5 such questions which you should ask before choosing a social share plugin.
1. Does it sell my data?
Privacy issues have hit hard on personal lives. You’ve probably had the experience of receiving emails from unknown senders mentioning about the cure to your migraine problem with a *Buy Now *or *Consult *CTA button, just after few days of you reading migraine articles and sharing it with your friends.
Many businesses are caught selling customer data which included personal data too. Such type of privacy invasion is a concern.
Another factor which should be considered with it is compliance to country specific data policies. European countries have strict data policies which every software provider should comply with.
If you are privacy concerned, do read Terms and Conditions before choosing a plugin provider.
2. How many Share platforms does it support?
You never know where your visitors will land up. It is a common perception that Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Pinterest are the social platforms which receive most sharing hits, but do you know China doesn’t have facebook and has their own social network called Weibo.
There can be various such examples which can prove the above perception wrong. Depending upon the business type, demographics, and usage, the above perception can change.
You have the insights, you have the goal audience, you have the research. Look for a provider which supports most of the share buttons and is updated.
3. Does it offer customization?
This one is the most we receive in our support mails. Most of our social plugin users want to fork our existing settings to provide more flexibility and we welcome it.
Most of the share plugins are bound to their own features.
For social9, we are focused on full customization options from buttons colors to size and animations. click here to check the full details
4. Is it SEO Friendly?
SEO is a big factor which help websites to gain traffic. Anything disrupting your SEO efforts is a poison to your site, so are such social share plugins which are a barrier for crawlers.
Some plugins are so poorly coded or are just coded for functionality not for SEO, that it hinders rendering of a page by brawl bots.
Taking another scenario where share plugins fail to display OG meta tags of the content shared. Failing to display OG tags will decrease CTR on the shared content because no specifics are provided about the content and dynamically generated tags cannot be trusted.
5. How Lightweight is it?
Website speed matters. Do you know 1 second delay in page response can result in a 7% reduction in conversions? Well, that’s a hell lot of percentage for just a small time frame. Alike other elements on a website, social share buttons also take up server resources and contribute in page load time.
The best way to check is using website speed test tools which can analyze page-speed of all the pages on the site.
We consider these questions as the base which has helped us grow to a huge user base we have now.
You now have a clear vision towards choosing the right social share plugin for your website. So before hitting download or install, do ask these 5 questions and make a fair choice.