Sharing content – from articles you read online to songs you are listening to – is as much a part of social media now as smiley faces and animated graphics were when instant messaging first started. Everyone shares everything. That might be an exaggeration, but not by much, and Léonie Watson at Nomensa seems to agree
Sharing is an essential element of social media for the following reasons:
- How we all interact within social networks – Facebook, Twitter, Google+ (and the myriads of others) – ecosystems, between people we know, and people who follow our actions and content we promote.
- How we interact between the web outside and the ‘walled gardens’ of our social networks. Sharing opens a gate between the two, but it is a gate we as individual users can control.
- Advertising revenue. The more you like, share, and tweet content, the more data social networks can collect on you as a user. Making it that much easier to target relevant advertising at you – as your interests are more accurately recorded. We live in an era unprecedented for the data footprint we are leaving of our actions. All of this contributes to information collected, collated, and used for marketing purposes. Mad Men would look a lot less sexy discussing data analytics, but that’s what modern marketing is about.
That is what sharing comes down to. But without it social networks would be very dull walled gardens. For those who are visually impaired or dyslexic sharing is not quite so simple. Not if you are on the web outside and wish to share what you have just read on a social network.
It comes down to where the buttons are placed on a website. Léonie of Nomensa recommends they are positioned after the content – if you are a web manager – that you wish your audience to share. Some web publishing platforms, like WordPress, makes this easy.
But many do not, and if it comes down to a choice, in order to make your website accessible to all then located at the bottom of the page. We hope you will like, tweet and +1 this article. Our buttons are located directly below.
