Custom Social Media icons: Good or bad?
-
Hi guys,
In our never-ending search for better SEO strategies and results, our journey has led us to question the idea of creating custom social media icons for our site. We are wondering if anyone has had experience, either negative or positive, by using these icons, or if there is no difference at all?
I would like to make it clear that we are only thinking about customizing the icons that lead to our Facebook page, Twitter profile, YouTube channel, etc. NOT the like/share/tweet/etc buttons. We understand the negative effects in changing those icons, but are interested in knowing if creating general icons that match our design will be a good or bad thing.
Any replies are appreciated, thanks!
-
Besides what Ryan said, I'd also add that they still need to clearly convey that they're links to those social media sites. I've seen some customized icons that have gone too far on the stylistic side and they were impossible to tell what they were for.
-
Stylistic changes, such as your social media icons, can be good or bad depending on how your visitors perceive them.
If you had a Star Trek theme site, you could stylize your icons to look like Star Trek badges. If your users fall in love with the look, that could lead to your site being mentioned and linked to from other related sites, and even graphic design sites. Your users may like the look so much they decide to click on them more often.
Alternatively, if your visitors disliked the icons they could be used less.
This design decision really isn't much different then any other design decision you could make for your site. At the highest end, you can create a design that is so loved, others either pay you to use your design, or you share it free and receive links based on the design.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Social Media Tool
Hello Everyone,
Social Media | | vndflkvnlkzdfnv
I'm trying to find a tool that allows me to post to twitter, facebook and google+ at the sametime. Does anyone have a recommendation? Thanks!0 -
Counting unique landing pages in Google Analytics: social vs organic channels
Remember the technique Rand posted for counting the unique indexed landing pages on a site? http://moz.com/blog/indexation-for-seo-real-numbers-in-5-easy-steps I'm using Google Analytics to compare this result for the "social" channel vs. the "organic search" channel. The idea is to see whether social or search delivers people to more unique landing pages. I would expect organic search to yield a significantly higher count, due to long tail searches for relatively obscure terms. We have an archive of over 500k pages that Google could be indexing, even if only a fraction of a percent of those might be getting social mentions. But that's not what the numbers show -- I'm seeing roughly 10% higher numbers for the Social channel than for Organic Search. Again, I'm counting unique landing pages here, not the total pageviews or visits. If anyone else here is monitoring these metrics, please chime in with your results. What's the baseline expectation for a large website with hundreds of thousands of pages of issue-centric user-generated content? Should search traffic provide 2x more landing page exposures than social? 5x? 10x? or 0.9x, as in my case? In short, I believe these numbers are pointing to an indexing/ranking problem following a recent site redesign.
Social Media | | mcglynn0 -
Social data for links
Hey can anyone recommend a tools out there, which can look at a list of urls (over 20+) and it will show the social stats for each url (e.g. number of Facebook Shares, Tweets, etc)? Or a tool which searchers within a certain category or niche (might be based on the keyword you entered), and finds the most shared content? Cheers, Chris
Social Media | | MBASydney0 -
Crawling of Social data
Just a quick inquisitive question. Websites like Facebook and Twitter arent public, they obviously allow a page title and snippet of account info in search results. So how are is social metrics gathered as regards to Tweets or Shares or Likes etc. in crawling data gathering? Would this give some insite how best to share social media too?
Social Media | | xtopher660 -
What social would be good, what buttons to use
Hello, What social media do you recommend for nlpca(dot)com and what kind of buttons convert best for a site like that? We're working on facebook right now: http://www.facebook.com/pages/The-NLP-Coaching-Institute-of-California/187804434598142 So far I like the buttons on the top right of this site: weddingmountain(dot)com. Thanks!
Social Media | | BobGW0 -
Does social media really work?
I just finished a 2 week test using Twitter. The person running the test was tweeting for 1 hour every day, but the tweets were broken up into several different times throughout the day. She engaged in conversations, retweeted, posted interested and catchy topics and linked to our blog. By the end of the test, we only saw a 7% increase in traffic to the blog. There was no noticeable increase in sales. According to an article I read by Business Insider, Applied Predictive Technologies ran a test to help companies like Starbucks measure the impact of social media. They concluded that social media accounted for a 2% increase in sales. That's not much for the time and money that goes into it. What's your experience with social media? When I first posted this, I neglected to say this Twitter account is one we have been activly using for about 2 years, and we have posted to it at least once or twice every day for the last couple of years. And, we are a well established company for the past 8 years, and we regularily submit press releases and have written 2 articles per day on our blog for several years.
Social Media | | BradBorst0 -
Social Media
Hello, How much weight do links from social media carry for seo? We are trying to develop a social media package for a client and we are unclear as to how much time to dedicate to SM every month and we would like some opinions. Thanks!
Social Media | | imageworks-2612900 -
Social Accounts/Networks Multiple account management?
Having tried Yoono and Tweetdeck I'm leaning towards Tweetdeck for ease of use.... Managing 5 facebook accounts, 9 facebook pages and 6 twitter accounts at the moment... Any other suggestions for tool or software I should consider?
Social Media | | JohnW-UK0