With the incredible explosion of social media, there are social media sites everywhere. Any time you turn around, it seems there is another one. I’m not just talking about the big boys, like Facebook and Twitter, either. Mister Wong, anyone?(Sadly, Mister Wong is no longer with us.)
Cool name aside, there is only so much one person can do. So how do you decide which of these services to use? While I get that you might want to provide each and every one of them on your site so that you gain maximum exposure, there is a limit, right? How can you possibly expect to keep up? Enter even more services, which aim to help you do so. Now how do you decide among them?
That’s where it gets challenging.
The largest offerings in this field are probably AddThis and ShareThis, though there are other options.
You can certainly roll your own, but that means not only keeping up with the offerings out there, you have to collect all the buttons for the services and then figure out how to post to each one of them. No fun at all.
Perhaps most importantly, however, is the impact to your visitors, and there is a difference. At least one person has decided that because of recent performance problems, third-party services, as useful as they are, should be disabled. Perhaps that is the answer.
When you use a third-party service, it loads, often by JavaScript, meaning it takes time – and as we become more and more impatient, those valuable seconds are really annoying. Even a few well-placed buttons, such as from the larger and more popular services, may seem like a more viable alternative. You may want to consider this when deciding what to add on your own site.