Hi Dustin W. Stout, Jason T. Wiser & Nicholas Cardot,
I bought 5 licences of the Social Warfare plugin last Friday and wow- I am impressed! I love the simplicity of the plugin in the front end, but you’ve built some amazing features into the back end.
I really love the way you can allocate a specific image to Pinterest. In fact I’ve been thinking about that very thing over the last few weeks and wondering about the best way to achieve that. Amazing work, guys! Also the way it works beautifuly for non-techie people but it’s so easy to customize for web devs too. Love that! Also love the click to tweet option – works well.
I’ve spoken with Dustin W. Stout by email and asked a few questions, and he was really helpful. I’ve just got a bit of feedback/questions- hope it’s ok if I share with you.
1) Love the Pinterest image option, but of course if people click on the Pinterest browser extension it doesn’t share the Pinterest image- because this doesn’t appear in the article text. Have you any thoughts on this? There probably isn’t a good work around. The only solution I thought of was to add a “nopin” attribute to all images on the page and embed the Pinterest optimized image at the top. Maybe it doesn’t matter?
2) I was previously using the SumoMe share plugin, which I never liked. I had noticed that the number of Facebook shares was different between SumoMe and Social Warfare. The number of FB shares was always higher in Social Warfare. Any thoughts?
3) I understand and respect your decision to keep the number of sharing options to the minimum. I think this is definitely the right way. However (and maybe this doesn’t matter) the display of number of shares on my articles has gone down, basically because you don’t take in to account the number of shares on Buffer and StumbleUpon. I get quite a few shares via those networks. I was wondering (and maybe this is a dreadful idea) whether you could take into account those networks in the total number of shares? Probably a bad idea, but interested in your thoughts.
4) Love the way you can add the Twitter handle for click to tweet and the Twitter share options. How about doing that for Pinterest shares? I’ll be adding “via @iagdotme” in my Pinterest text for now, but would be good to have the option.
5) I assume you use media queries in CSS to change the layout responsively for different screen sizes? It’s a little weird that the buttons don’t change into mobile or tablet mode when I resize the browser window for testing. Any thoughts? I saw that you fixed the mobile layout over the weekend which is great, however it no longer gives the number of social shares on the mobile view. Maybe that is best, but I am not sure?
6) For Google+, what do you think about an option of sharing the photo of the article as well as the link to the article? That is probably not possible via the sharing API. What do you think?
7) I was going to ask you about the possibility of a static sidebar version of the sharing buttons- the way DiggDigg and SumoMe do it. However, now that I’ve got it static at the bottom of the page, I am not so sure I want that now. Are you thinking of a static sidebar version too?
Thanks! 🙂
