Are Social Sharing Buttons Always Good To Include In Web Pages?

Social sharing buttons are definitely essential for marketers to feature on some of their website pages in order to increase traffic and improve their landing page conversions. But the question lies in whether these social sharing buttons will always yield positive results for marketers if they are included every time in web pages. In some situations, social sharing buttons can do more harm than good for your business despite their benefits in driving more fans. Therefore, business marketers should realize that it is not a good practice to think of inserting social sharing buttons all the time.Let’s take a closer look at some situations where these social icons might hurt your marketing activities:

Longer page loading time: Each social icon along with its corresponding channel needs javascript code in order to connect your site with social network servers. Moreover, if you are using wordpress for social sharing plugins, more javascript files need to be loaded from the supplier of the wordpress plugin .Thus, as you include additional social icons, you need more script for the page to load which cause the page to take longer to respond.
Page loading time is a major factor that should be taken into consideration since it forces users to either stay or bounce from your website. Web visitors expect your page to respond in 2 seconds or less, otherwise they will leave your website when it takes 3 minutes or more, according to a survey conducted by Akamai and Forrester research. In additon, page loading time might also affect your website SEO ranking.

Increase visitors confusion: There are many different goals you need to achieve when directing your user to a landing page. For example, if one of these objectives is to encourage your visitor to make a purchase and proceed a check out, social sharing buttons do not make sense in such a case because they confuse your users of what they were mainly looking for, consequently, they might forget their actual demand which is buying your product.

Taloon, a Finland based hardware ecommerce store, had removed Facebook and Pinterest icons located in the original page, leading to a better conversion in the challenger page.
Taloon has realized that the presence of social icons were distracting their customers from their major goal.
In summary, it is critical to figure out that not all the time, social sharing buttons lead to a greater conversion rate or boost your number of fans. Ultimately, it depends on the outcome you are willing to reach. For example if positioning social buttons is among your plans, and the outcome your are willing to reach goes in line with your plans, go for it. However if your  objective is positioned toward an opposite direction you have to consider revising your plans and make the required edits.