The rise of ‘Share’ & ‘Follow’ on the web

June 23rd, 2010   Posted by tyler in Design

Most businesses these days have social networks accounts they maintain. Likewise, so does just about every user out there. The goal for each is to stay connected by taking advantage of the social web and its two-way nature; sharing content as well as consuming content shared by others.

Naturally, clients want to exploit social channels by advertising them on their sites as well.  Oftentimes now, when you set out to design a site for someone, you have to take into account the presence of social web controls. At first is was probably okay to just fill in a bit of white space with a Facebook or Twitter logo somewhere on the home page as an afterthought. But with the social web being nearly ubiquitous now, it’s time to reexamine that approach. It is critical to take into account the context of the space your share/follow icons will live. Also, consider which affordances you will incorporate to let the user know weather they are able to take actions for share, follow, or both. Unfortunately, there is little consistency across the web so far in presentation and few standards for where and when to use your social controls.

Context is critical. You should give people a reason to so something social on your site. If you want them to follow your Twitter account, make that suggestion next to some great content and hook them while they’re interested. Context has the power to give deeper meaning to something. If you simply tuck  your social calls to action into 16×16 space down in your footer, you are not leveraging their full potential.

Next, consider affordances. Affordances are the subtle details that let a user know what is going to happen if they perform an action. Classic examples include underlining hypertext, altering the visual treatment of a button when you roll over it, or changing the arrow cursor to a hand cursor when you can click and drag something. These signals give us all a pretty clear idea about how elements on the site work even if we are new to the interface. But what about when a designer just plunks down a Facebook logo onto the page? Do we all assume the same things about it’s meaning. I doubt it. If you click it will you go to that companies Facebook page? Or will you be prompted to be their ‘’friend’, or indicate weather you ‘like’ something? Who knows without a proper affordance? Let your audience know what is going to happen before it happens. This will ease anxiety and hopefully result in more clicks.

Finally, in a perfect world, there would be some consistency in the icons used. A universal ‘share’ icon is suggested at this website: http://shareicons.com/ but has yet to catch on in a meaningful way. Interestingly, there is no mention of ‘follow’ icons. Share and follow are distinctly different actions yet they are closely associated because they are reciprocal to each other. It also does not help many web sites incorporate the same icon sets for both functionality types.

This paradigm of large social media sites being omnipresent (even on other people’s sites!) is still a fairly new one. So it’s not surprising we don’t have it completely figured out yet. The old convention, ‘Design is in the details’, comes to mind. If you’re designing for a site, put some thought into your social controls. They deserve to be scrutinized and refined with just as much thought put into them as any other new twist that has come before them.

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