While much has been written about the many different ways to effectively float your message and brand across the social media space,  little is being offered about the functionality of design in social media integration.

With that in mind, I've compiled some thoughts on how to increase your return on investment when designing and configuring social media sharing buttons.

A few best practices to always consider:

• Do NOT use social media icons to simply link out to profiles. This is not only out-dated but also minimizes the potential value of social media integration.
• As much as possible, show the number of times a piece of content has been shared or the number of Likes, or the number of followers.
• When pieces of content have very few shares, or a user has few followers there are two options: Either round-up everyone you can to increase the number of shares,  or

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