Ask HN: Do people still use the social media buttons on your website? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Do people still use the social media buttons on your website?

8 pointsctack11 comments

I'm about to start a new project and am curious if the social media share buttons that appear on many websites are or ever were actually used?

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I'd like to have them, but I don't want to load any external scripts on my site (for speed purposes mostly). Is it possible to make your own share button and share something on the various social media networks with just an URL, or a POST request?

This is the way I prefer to do it as well.

Here's a pretty good guide to the URLs and parameters for the common ones:

https://jonsuh.com/blog/social-share-links/

This is cool. Great explanation, thanks.

Last year, a project that does this was featured as a 'Show HN': Sharingbuttons.io [1]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12209595

That makes things really easy. I especially like that they use SVG instead of images. Saves yet another request :)

I always put them on any project I do in which I want people to share the page. I have always had success and the buttons serve as a reminder for people to take action. They are less likely to just share the URL than if they see buttons there to help them.

This website has got a bad reputation, but I've rarely had any issues with them. I think any issues I have had were easily handled with some CSS or some htaccess URL blocking.

Nonetheless, I still use it on all my websites. Simply copy the code into the pages you want or the footer if you are using a platform like WordPress, and the code takes care of the rest.

http://sharebutton.net/

FYI: I am in no way associated with the owner of that website.. I just think whoever created it did a great job at making social sharing easy... and no plugin required!

yeah they load up my Google Analytics stats with referral spam all the time.

On Desktop, I guess users click on it because there's no other native way to share.

On Mobile phones, users tend to go the native way - for most of the people, they use Chrome's share because it's easier.

Yes, If things are interesting or if they get any rewards they will share with the people. Specially whatsapp or any other messaging application.

I didn't know about the whatsapp share button - that is very neat.

I would be curios to know which of the buttons gets the most use

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