A few weeks back I posted an article around why I was updating my social buttons for my blog, and why I was removing Digg from that list. I’ve had the new set in place since that point, and it’s done pretty good things. I want to take it one step further though.

When I look at the collection of buttons at the top and bottom of each article, it feels really cluttered. I guarentee most of the buttons that people see there they either don’t know what are, or don’t use the service to care – which led me onto thinking – What if I focus the buttons on a particular user?

This is no easy task, and one I haven’t found an ultimate solution for, however until that time I am putting in place an interim stop-gap which should hopefully mean my social buttons are slightly more relevant to the user on my page.

So Why?

It’s a pretty well known fact that web ads work best when targetted. Google not only generate contextual ads, but are now also displaying them based on the what they know about the user that is seeing the ads – ie personalized. There really is no point in showing buttons for people that don’t care about Reddit, or Technorati for example.

The second reason – which I mentioned earlier is page clutter. I want to try and keep the site as minimal as possible, and give the user only the information that they need to see. Regular readers will have noticed the subtle changes I have made to try and clean up the blog, seperating the main content and the sidebar for example was a key problem. The page was far too busy – so by clearly defining the two zone, simply by adding a divider and background color cleaned that up for me instantly.

It’s an ever evolving process, and there’s much more work to do…

Current Setup

At the moment I am presenting to the user the following options:

1. RSS
2. Delicious
3. Twitter
4. StumbleUpon
5. Technorati
6. DZone
7. Reddit

Not a huge list, yet a little too much clutter anyway.

Proposal

My proposal is to look at the referring link that the user has come from, and present to them a subset of these options. Items 1,2,3 and 4 are pretty generic, so they are actually going to be the mainstays of the social toolbar, however past that point is where I get specific.

I’m using PHP to determine the page referrer:

$domain = explode("/", $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER']);

Whilst this is not a guarantee that the user came from a specific location (browsers don’t always send the referrer and the user can change it if they wanted), it’s likely – which is good enough for me in this context.

I’m then doing the following as a simple check:

if(($domain[2] == "www.dzone.com") || ($domain[2] == "dzone.com")
{
// show DZone Button
}

Very simplistic in it’s approach. If $domain is empty, I simply display nothing. The risk is that a user does come from DZone and for whatever reason their HTTP_REFERER is not set, so I lost out on a possible button display. However I think the risk is actually minimal based on the stats I have seen on referrer links in my Clicky web analytics.

The outcome is a much cleaner display, minimal buttons, and only displayed where necessary. Should I re-implement Digg?

Thoughts?

What do you think of this approach? Is it better to show all, or to target your audience? How are you doing it? Love to get feedback…

This entry was posted on Monday, March 23rd, 2009 and is filed under Development, Social-Web. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.