Someone asked me recently why my blog does not have all the social media buttons that they see on all other blogs.

It’s a good question. I used to have them all but I recently read the article, Sweep the Sleaze, which influenced the latest re-design of my blog. The guys over at iA argue why these buttons are pretty pointless to most users. There is an interesting fact from the guys over at Smashing Magazine & how when they removed their Facebook Like button, traffic from Facebook actually increased. The cause of this is that users started sharing links on their timeline, rather than the usual Like Buttons message appearing. The user sharing a link meant more of their friends/subscribers clicked the link. Its an interesting read which challenges a lot of what people class as “social media strategy”.

It got me thinking about the buttons which I use myself when I visit other websites. I’m not on all the social networks & even if I were, I would not share the articles I read on most of them. I use the networks differently. I do not share the same information across them all. I like to keep my personal & professional lives as separate as possible. Facebook is the network I use for my private social life, where as I user Twitter for my professional/business life which is a lot more public. Most of the articles I read & want to share are  professional/business/industry relates so I would only share them on Twitter. I think this is the same of most people in my industry. This is why I only included the Twitter Share button in this latest re-design.

I know people will disagree with this logic & I’m sure there will be users out there who won’t be willing to copy the link, open Facebook of Google+, paste it in & share it. I don’t think its going to effect me that much.