Any reports on clickthru rates for social sharing icons?

I’m designing a new site for myself that will have a lot of potential for people to share information from it. I’ve seen all those ‘Share This’ links with hundreds of micro icons, which I personally hate and don’t think anyone actually uses.

I was going to include 3-5 social share icons on my site, but I was curious if there was any report on which ones are more commonly used and then which ones are actually clicked on. I keep searching around but all I seem to find are scripts and help to install social sharing on your site.

Was thinking of using:

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • StumbleUpon
  • Reddit
  • Digg

Thanks in advance for any help you can give.

Just thought I’d extend on Ted’s comment here around the dependency on audience. Why this is important is that you might have a social network that is heavily related to your content. So for example if your talking about corvettes there might be a digg like site for that which will not be in your preconceived set of icons. A corvette site hitting the a digg like front page for corvette, if it’s large enough, will bring much more valuable traffic than the random acts of pageviews you get from hitting the front page of digg. (from someone who’s at stages achieved that and analyzed the traffic behavior).

It’s just something to consider when figuring out the set that is right for you.

Check out the usage of the “LIKE” button on decently trafficked sites and you’ll see the actual adoption. Can’t argue with the reality of those numbers.

I also believe that they are probably never clicked and they clutter the page. I was wondering if there were any reports on actual usage of those type of links?

In the meantime what I have done is provided a short url, twitter, facebook & stumbleupon. I only included stumbleupon because the content (art & design) generally does well with SU.

Please don’t include many social sharing icons. It clutters the page and they are rarely clicked. Active social media users will themselves go great lengths to share interesting content even if there are no icons.

Better to use Retweet buttons which show number of tweets so that you can display social proof that your content is good.

It will depend on your site audiance but generally the more used the tool is, the more people use the sharing feature. Facebook is easy with the like button, and the biggest. Twitter come next and the others follow by audiance. Some people also use other services like myspace, linkedin.