Each blogger wants to reach a larger audience with their blog, regardless of how many readers they currently have. Social media sites present one of the best opportunities for bloggers to expand their reach.

If you’re interested in increasing your traffic through social media you should be focusing time and effort on writing the best content possible and connecting with other social media users. However, one easy change that you can make is to start using social media icons on your site so visitors can vote for your content.

By placing a voting button on your site you are encouraging visitors to vote for you (think of it as a friendly reminder) and you’re making it quick and easy for them to vote. Simply reminding visitors that they can vote for you will help to increase the number of votes that you get.

Things You Don’t Want to Do with Social Media Voting Buttons

Because voting buttons, widgets and icons can encourage votes and lead to more visitors through social media, many bloggers tend to overdo them. You will see blogs with voting buttons for every possible social media site you can image.

This is a bad approach to take. Too many icons and buttons will leave you with a very cluttered blog that isn’t easily readable, and it will be distracting to readers. Additionally, this approach tends to result in votes that are spread out over a large number of social media sites, which will usually produce poor results.

Say you are using 30 different buttons or icons on your site, and each one of them gets one vote from a reader. If this is the case, you will see very little traffic from those social media sites, because it takes more votes to make a difference. But if you were to have 5 buttons/icons and you got 30 total votes, that would be an average of 6 votes per button, which might be enough to get some traffic.

By showing only a few voting buttons, you are helping visitors by telling them that these are the specific sites where you want votes. With too many buttons they will not know which sites are your preferred places to get votes.

Do’s for Using Social Media Voting Buttons

Place only a small number of social media voting buttons on your blog, I recommend 2 or 3. Carefully chose the social media sites based on fit with your audience, as well as their potential to send traffic to your site.

For the best results, don’t focus only on larger social media sites like Digg and Reddit. These sites are often dominated by major websites and blogs that already have a huge audience. Don’t ignore smaller but more targeted niche-specific sites. They may not send as much traffic, but it will be far easier.

Some blogs will have audience that consist largely of people that do not use social media. If this is the case for you, consider using your blog to inform your readers about a particular social media site, how they can use it, and how they can vote for you.