Quick post, sharing some thoughts. In my experience creating and developing sites, for this example primarily blog sites, I run into a lot of different ideas concerning the placement of social bookmarking icons. I am not referring to profile links to your various social homes, but the icons that allow your end users to share across these various social sites.

What is good placement? Some clients insist on adding these icons every where regardless of display type (excerpt or full story). In my opinion adding icons such as those included in the popular sociable plugin to the excerpt list on the home page adds unneeded clutter to the content. It would seem to me that an end user is less likely to bookmark an item before reading the content in it’s entirety, at the very least scanning the content in it’s entirety. Thus the social icons attached to the end of a paragraph’s worth of content would seem to be rather unneeded?

Letting it slide. There are a few that I could see making sense as additions to excerpted content such as the Tweetmeme button. It seems to me that a button illustrating the number of times something has been shared across social sites would act as more of a testament as to how useful the content has been to others. Of course that to is up for debate, since a user with a rather large following on say twitter could tweet a crap article and immediately have it re-tweeted upwards of 100 times. None the less it is still being spread far and wide. In this case the button makes the article seem more appealing.

I am interested to hear others opinion on this. Personally I add these icons or links where I feel they become useful to an end user in spreading my content, primarily at the end of each full article. This however is not the case with everyone I come across.

Thoughts?

Have a suggestion for a post or see something that we could improve, please let us know!