The Case Against Share Buttons

Liked Nobody clicks your share buttons by Derek Hanson (derekhanson.blog) The UK government ran one of the most thorough studies on this. When GOV.UK added social sharing buttons, they tracked usage for 10 weeks across 6.8 million pageviews. The share buttons got clicked 14,078 times. That’s a 0.21% usage rate, which works out to about 1 in 476 visitors. The most telling part: the feature sat in their backlog for ages because zero end users had ever requested it. In their user testing, people just copied and pasted links. Back in The New Leaf Journal’s early days, I had share buttons on my articles. I eventually removed them in part because I did not think they added anything useful to my site and in part because of a certain Pinterest incident. I had not thought about them in some time, but I nevertheless read Derek Hanson’s Nobody clicks your share buttons with interest (HT Ankur Sethi). Mr. Hanson cited to evidence that few people click share buttons because they can easily share…