2Ts 2 Cents
Moooooo-gle Analytics: Sharing is Caring
I’ve been carrying Animals in Translation around in my bag for the last couple of months. Temple Grandin talks about animals, their emotions; and the similarities and differences with humans. It’s a cool book and there are loads of interesting anecdotes about animals doing weird shit — ask me about the roosters who forgot how to dance, savage.
In the book, Temple talks about cows a lot. They’re her favourite animal and she worked with abattoirs to design systems that would be less stressful for them. Cows hate corners, they hate shadows and they fucking hate things moving around. The slaughterhouses she visited were using cattle prods to force a load of freaked out cows through their systems. Temple came in, looked at things from a cow’s point of view and removed every potential barrier. She got down on her knees and actually looked at the world how a cow would. She got rid of things casting weird shadows, she got rid of changes in ambient light and she got rid of anything swinging or blowing in the wind. She got rid of any corners and introduced curved channels because that’s what cows are in to. Rather than forcing cows where cows don’t wanna go, she gave them an easy route and the cows did their cow thing. The cows were less stressed, the slaughterhouses were more efficient, Temple got paid and helped bovine-kind along the way — everyone wins.
When we’re building things we should get down on our knees and look at everything from a user’s point of view. If there is something that we want people to do, we should make it as easy as possible for them to do it. If we want a site to be seen by lots of people we should make it easy for users to share — with a sharing CTA!
I’ve seen the results of a few studies around sharing buttons and CTAs and broadly the findings are:
Passive Sharing Button — Around 0.5% of users click these buttons. They’re OK for using on large sites where there are lots of articles with no clear actions for the user.
Share CTA — Between 2% and 4% of users will click a button labelled “Share” after completing a game or quiz; or after an interactive experience is finished.
Relevant Share CTA — If the wording of a CTA shows the benefits of sharing to the user they’re more likely to share it. Although there won’t always be obvious user benefits, if sharing something socially fits in with the story that the user tells themself; about being competent, intelligent or generous; they’re much more likely to share it. For example, on a digital skills website adding a “add to your profile” LinkedIn sharing button saw more than half of users who completed the exercises share their progress.
If a site gets 10,000 users a month, if the site is good and there are clear sharing buttons we could expect it to be shared a few hundred times! Even if you think Facebook is rubbish. Even if the only reason you go on Facebook is to see the weird stuff your grandma writes and correct her when she’s accidentally racist. Even then, hundreds of people sharing things with their hundreds of friends can have a big impact on how many people visit the site — and it’s all free traffic!
Basically, social media is important and we should always have the human being who is going to use the sites we build in mind. We should think about who they are, what they want to do and what we want them to do. We shouldn’t take things for granted or assume things about our users and we should try to look at things with fresh, cow eyes.
Bless bless.
