Does your blog look like a Christmas tree at the end of each post with dozens of small icons for every obscure social media site? Just because there is a plug-in for your blog that makes it easy to add them, doesn’t mean that you should do it.
At first glance the idea of encouraging your blog readers to digg, stumble, bookmark and recommend your post seems sound. And if it works for a few services, more has to be better. Right?
If we think about it from your readers perspective: Do the social bookmarking links add any value for your reader?
If your reader is actively using one of the social media sites, it’s very likely that they have the accompanying toolbar installed. Clicking on the familiar toolbar button is probably much faster than finding the right tiny icon on your site.
If your reader does not know what social bookmarking is all about, it’s unlikely that they will take the dozens of icons on your site as an inspiration to find out AND then after they have registered on a site come back to your post to bookmark it.
Other than *yourself*, how many people do you think are going to take the time to highlight your post on more than one social media site?
So is it worth it to take up this much space on your blog with these icons? The correct answer is of course to test it. You can track clicks on outbound links with Google Analytics.
That said, you should occasionally encourage your readers to digg your post on a single service that you are targeting for that particular post.
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