I been a member of Webmaster World for nearly 25 years now and lately there has been a lot of discussion about the usefulness of social links, specifically share and follow. One in particular has drawn a lot of attention, X, formerly Twitter. Many websites are doing away with it as they feel it has become a "toxic cesspool" and could be more detrimental than beneficial. I myself have dropped X from all websites I own or manage, often replacing it with BlueSky, but the overall consensus is social links are not what they use to be and actually provide no benefit. There were also concerns about third party social apps causing PCI DSS compliance issues.

Now I know every situation is different, but you might want to reevaluate the use of social links in this day and age, and be very selective about the ones you use.

Marshall
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NOTE: Not choosing sides here, just stating facts.

Twitter used to sensor, cancel and/or delete people or posts if those of such didn't meet their ideology.

X now allows both sides of the story. aka (Free Speech)

Example #1: I remember reading Twitter posts that had to do with people saying they disagreed with the Covid shots, lock downs, social distancing, masks, etc. Their posts would eventually get dropped. They would get labeled as Conspiracy Nuts. Years later we are finding out that the "Conspiracy" is now factual and all the social distancing, masks, shots, etc did not work. You still got sick.

Example #2: Facebook was doing the same thing. Years ago we had a FB account and were regularly posting things to it. It was working great for awhile then all of a sudden our followers stopped seeing our posts. Come to find out we were being "Shadow Banned" because of our industry. We own a Bullet Manufacturing business and the ownership of FB did not agree with what we do. We NEVER posted anything hateful, criminal, etc. All of our posts were informational. They just didn't like us or what we were offering. Where is the free speech in that?

This kind of crap is what got me to cancel all my social media accounts and delete them from my website. I like the idea now that "all" people have a say (free speech) on X but the bridge is burned for me and I will not start up any new account.

I also don't see the benefit of having social media links on your website in today's age. I don't think it helps in your rankings like it used to. If you do your SEO correctly you will still be on page one in searches.

Yes, free speech can be toxic at times but it's nice to see and hear Both sides of the story, whether you agree with it or not.

Respectfully,

Patrick

I was listening to a podcast a few weeks ago where they were going through the statistics of just how much people agree on issues on both sides of the political divide, and apart from a radical fringe for the most part, on most issues that really seems to be the case. Unfortunately we let that fringe dominate the narrative and I do unfortunately see this move to BlueSky as one more way to increase the polarization and we will end up not even knowing what that common ground is. For me Twitter was a nest of vipers before Elon took over and it continues to host the best and worst of humanity. But this clip was quite telling (even though I'm sure everyone has different reasons) where the BBC reporter seems to have decided beforehand how things would be under Elon...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XqJKAnN0-gM

But for a sane world, deleting all social media from websites, phones, tablets and anywhere else would probably be the way to go.

Vince

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We put social media links on our store footers probably 10 years ago, and I'm embarrassed to say that upon seeing this thread I checked and found that only the Facebook and Twitter links still work.

Twitter and Blue Sky both seem like cesspools of dispair, while the typical Facebook interaction is somebody posting a vague, unanswerable question like "how much is shipping to El Salvador?"

Can anyone suggest alternatives to these four attractive but useless footer icons?

Hi Paul,

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Can anyone suggest alternatives to these four attractive but useless footer icons

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One of my companies have 70,000 subscribers on youtube and we have over 2000 videos there.
So I recommend you go with them as an addition.
Facebook is still a viable option.
David

Good suggestion to focus more on YouTube content!

For now we've replaced those creepy social network sites' footer links with similarly-colored icons that link to our key information pages:



Edited to add:

I've found ChatGPT to be helpful for writing new, chatty posts for our company Facebook page, based on information found on our website. I use a prompt like, "write an engaging Facebook post based on www.example.com/info-page-one.php".

The ChatGPT output looks like it was written by a drunk teenager - complete with silly emojis and oddball punctuation - but it can be a decent starting point. A buddy with similar distain for social media suggested this.