Posted on September 21, 2011 by Kevin Getch One of the most pervasive elements you will see on any professional website is those social media icons… usually found right on the homepage. But the real value comes when you have social share buttons, and according to a new report, only slightly more than half of all website do this. People love to share information with each other and if you aren’t making it easy for them, you are missing out on free publicity. There are very important and valuable reasons to have your social media links readily available and shareable for your website visitors. Maybe the most important reason is highlighted in the report by SEO platform provider Bright Edge who found that sites with a Twitter share button had seven times more link mentions than sites without it. While Facebook still leads the pack of social sharing at a 50.3 percent adoption rate, Twitter is close behind at 42.5 percent. The process of adding social sharing buttons to your website is so simple, there’s really no reason not to do it. But if you need more convincing, here’s more reason to include social sharing buttons on your website: According to a study by ShareThis, websites that use their share button see 31 percent of their referral traffic and 10 percent of website visits come from sharing. Social sharing comes with many benefits, particularly that referrals will usually be high quality traffic. For one, people who share information via social media are doing so with people they know. This provides a level of trust for the recipient who will almost definitely be receiving the link from someone they want to hear from. Social sharing provides a quick and powerful way for marketing your business. It behooves you to encourage your customers to share information about your business, whether it’s supplied on your website, in email correspondence or on your social media pages. Not doing so means you are missing out on some of the most cost effective and powerful proponents of your business – your own customers.