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I am recently working on the mobile version of a website and came across this link - https://www.zdnet.com/article/study-claims-99-percent-of-users-ignore-sharing-buttons-on-mobile/

I am still wondering what's a good UX practice when it comes to having social sharing buttons on the mobile version of a site.

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  • Sharing in general is low, and it's correct it's lower on mobile. I don't think those figures are accurate, though. At least I never saw these figures on my sites or my client's. While they vary, I'd say between 3 and 7% must be more realistic than 0.2%. This is lower that click trough for CTA!
    – Devin
    Jul 23, 2018 at 4:18

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Most likely it depends on the context and the intention for your app/business, as well as the incentives the user has for such actions.

Intentions: If we're just individuals making an app and growing a personal email list with/for it, our share button will be (subconsciously detected and) ignored. Also, we simply must have an app worth sharing first, otherwise it's all for nothing anyway; that share button could get clicked and still mean nothing.

Incentives: for example, the social media buttons will certainly be used if our app's demographic is the active Instagrammers crowd, they hit like buttons all the damn time. Those sharing buttons will also get used more heavily if there is some kind of reward for it (free content?).

Those are 2 specific cases, I expect most other cases therefore lead to the 99% of unused actions statistic above.

Solution: Work on the app quality. If we build it they will come.

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This is an interesting topic and article. I understand that space is a constraint in mobile apps but I feel, we should provide an option for sharing. If sharing in social media is relevant to the content presented in the app, then the size of the social media buttons can be bigger than usual!

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    Hello Gagsy and welcome to the User Experience Stackexchange! Please note that your current answer does not address the question, which is why it was downvoted. What you feel about a topic can be a nice anecdote. Though, without quoting a study or thoroughly explained observations from previous work, answers are unlikely to provide help for all users who may have this question in the future. Cheers!
    – Orphevs
    Jun 23, 2018 at 18:35
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All the hard work finding "awesome" ways in annoying the user with share options is wasted time. Based on all the projects I've worked at, with a combined amount of over 40 million users, I can tell you that people barely use the share buttons/links/functions and rather use the URL themself or just screenshot the said article/website/post/page ...

Within my projects I even noticed a slight drop of returning visitors for websites with share buttons compared to them without share button. It is a difference of just 1.72% but that was the final fact that made me stop using share buttons on projects.

If you feel the urge to use share buttons, do it like instagram and other sites, use a simple share icon (paperplane as example) that draws a module that includes share options.

I would have put this as comment, but that 50 rep restriction doesn't allow me to.

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  • This reads a little bit like a rant. The difference of returning visitors was an interesting statistic. I think that a lot depends on the user base.
    – Mayo
    Aug 22, 2018 at 13:05
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    @Mayo not a rant. ;)
    – marvinpoo
    Aug 23, 2018 at 7:08

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