Many sites are using social media icons with counts next to them. I want to offer this for my clients. Can anyone tell me what I need to do to get the count associated with the specific media icon? Is there a special link that is required?
Thanks in advance for any help.
Bob
It totally depends on which platform you are working, what type of website it is. Some blog providers like blogger and wordpress have different plugins and widgets by which you can easily implement these buttons on pages. Major social networking websites are also providing their scripts, you just need to customize them according to your information and implement in the page you want to display.
You can use addthis.com website to use and implement those set of icons with count. I would recommend you to create an account with website, so you can check the analytics of each elements.
Good one, shaadishoppe. Other than those, you can also pick the designs that you want to add to your site. I assume that you already have an analytics tool that you use to track the stats of your clients’ sites. The AddThis analytics records the number of clicks, retweets, and likes.
After I posted the question I did some further internet research.
Perhaps what follows will help other website developers. Then again maybe everyone knows this and I am the only naïve one.
Thanks to all who posted replies and feel free to expand on or correct this post.
A survey of a number of websites reveals that social media icons and links take a number of forms from large 32x32px icons to smaller icons that are sometimes referred to as Chiclets and the icons with related counters.
Many social media icons.can be freely downloaded. Recent DesignFestival articles have featured links to several download sites.
Another and increasingly more popular way of interfacing with a wide variety of social media sites is to configure the icons you want using one of several catchall services like ShareThis.com. The selections you make are then used to generate the Javascript and HTML code that a developer can copy and paste into their site. The configuration options include icons with counters arranged either vertically or horizontally.
An added feature of ShareThis is the ability to track and report on the usage of the icons or how many times an icon is clicked in much the same manner as Google Analytics. In fact you can reference the Google Analytics IDs.
A good article on the catchall services is available at Mashable, http://mashable.com/2011/03/11/add-social-sharing-buttons/
On most sites social media icons are linked to a Twitter, Facebook or Linkedin profile page related to the host site, for example, www.twitter.com/sitepoint.com or www.facebook.com/sitepoint while the catchall service icons provide the ability for the site visitor to post a reference to the article/page on their own social network page or email a reference to a friend. A counter will then display how many visitors have shared the page.
Some social network sites have a developer page where the developer can configure the button then copy and paste the code into the page they are developing. For example: https://dev.twitter.com/docs/tweet-button, http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/plugins/like/ and https://developer.linkedin.com/plugins/share-button.