If you provide excellent content, social media users will take the time to read and talk about it in their networks. That’s what you really want. You don’t want a cheap thumbs up, you want your readers to talk about your content with their own voice.

Interesting that sites saw greater social media usage when removing “like” buttons – makes sense – if someone ‘likes’ a page in Facebook you basically don’t see it, but if they manually link to it, they generally provide some commentary and that in turn gets more promotion across their friends timelines.