Tags – CSS-Tricks, polls, social sharing buttons

This Month’s CSS-Tricks Poll: The Importance of Social Sharing Buttons when Sharing Content

I’m a big fan of Chris Coyier (what a likeable guy) and CSS-Tricks and particularly like the polls Chris regularly conducts in the sidebar of his blog (note: for a quick view of past polls check out the dedicated poll archive page). Aside from the fact that CSS-Tricks has an audience large enough (over three-million pageviews a month) to presumably associate a reasonable degree of meaning to the results, the thing that makes these polls so darn interesting is, of course, the questions* Chris puts forth – and this month’s question in particular is, I think, one of the most fascinating and insightful to date…

The poll:

This best describes how I share links on my social media site(s) of choice:

I typically only share pages that have sharing buttons.
I don’t ever use sharing buttons. I share my own way.
I can go either way.

The results:

The results aren’t yet final (voting is still in progress – have a vote yourself?), however, I honestly thought that most people would be too lazy to share content on pages that don’t display social sharing buttons; according to the survey so far, however, I couldn’t be more wrong:

So far a whopping 60% (5,305 people) said “I don’t ever use sharing buttons. I share my own way”, 32% (2819 people) said “I can go either way”, and just 8% (762 people) said “I typically only share pages that have sharing buttons”!

Amazing (to me at least)!

…that said, the results of any such poll always runs the risk of displaying results that, rather than represent the general population, represent only one particular crowd: which, in this case, is, of course, the people who read CSS-Tricks…

What do you think? Is it safe to generalize with these results?

*sometimes a bit humorous, sometimes more serious…

If you haven’t already, head on over to CSS-Tricks and take a look/vote!