Nobody Clicks Those Icons Anyway. Indianapolis Links Them More Than Most.

You took a photo today and nobody asked you to.

Around four o’clock at a house on the far side of Indianapolis, when the job was finished and the mess was gone and the thing finally looked the way you’d promised it would back in April. The phone came out of your back pocket. You wiped the lens on your shirt and backed up a step to get all of it in the frame.

Then you took the same picture again, because your thumb was in the first one.

It went into your camera roll behind a screenshot of a parking sign and a photo of a serial number you took so you wouldn’t have to write it down. And there it sits.

Am I close?

Most owners around here do get that photo up somewhere eventually, usually on a Sunday evening, usually along with three others they took that week and forgot about. Most of them also point at it from their own website, which is the one habit this city turns out to be quietly excellent at.

68.4% of the Indianapolis sites I audited link out to at least one social profile, 3 of 24 when I lined the cities up, against 66% of everything I counted.

Nothing else in Indianapolis lands that high, and I checked it twice, because a city being best at the free thing and average at everything else is the sort of result I’ve learned to distrust on sight.

So I’m not writing this at the owners who already have the row of icons sitting in the footer. I’m writing it at the rest of you, and at the ones whose icons point somewhere you’d rather I didn’t open.

I’ve been collecting your reasons for about ten years. In order, best first, because two of them are stronger than the people saying them realize.

1) “There’s nothing on there worth showing”

The best of the four, and the only one aimed at a real problem.

A profile with four posts on it, all from the week your web guy set it up, is not an advertisement for anything. Neither is a page whose last update announced a phone number you stopped using in 2019.

I picked a heating company myself on nothing but a date once, and the one who’d posted last week got the job.

You already know that, which is exactly why the link isn’t there. You’re not lazy, you’re embarrassed, and from the outside those two look identical.

But hold the two things side by side. An account with nothing on it, and a photo from four o’clock this afternoon. Which of those is the hard problem?

That excuse holds up all the way, and the fix isn’t a line of code. It’s the picture in your pocket.

2) “That’s my personal page”

Fair, and the cheapest of the four to stop being true.

You don’t want a customer scrolling past your daughter’s graduation, your opinion of the Colts, and whatever your cousin posted in March that you’re still hearing about at family dinners.

A separate page for the business takes an evening. One evening, once, and then you never have to think about which account you’re logged into again.

Or link the one profile that’s already public and leave the others alone. Nobody said you had to link all five.

There’s one trade where I argued the other way for years, and telling a funeral director to leave the link off is the advice I most regret.

I’ve got no argument with this one. It just has a short shelf life, and you’re the only person who can end it.

Is it really what’s been stopping you, though, or is it standing in for the first excuse?

3) “Nobody clicks those icons anyway”

Mostly true, and pointed at the wrong thing.

I don’t think many people click them either. The footer has never been where anybody’s money comes from, and I’d be lying if I told you otherwise.

But think about who does click. Not the stranger who landed on you by accident and is already reaching for the back button.

It’s the woman who has read your whole page, mostly decided she wants you, and is now hunting for one last reason to feel good about spending the money.

She’s at the end of it. Those are expensive clicks, and there are never many of them, because there are never many people that far down the road with you on a given Tuesday.

What she wants over there isn’t your slogan, it’s evidence, and a dated photograph of a job you finished is the cheapest evidence any small business has ever been able to produce.

So the click rate is dreadful and the clicks are worth a fortune. Both true at once, which is why this excuse has survived so long.

Would you have clicked it yourself, the last time you hired anyone?

4) “I’ll link it once I’m posting properly”

Doesn’t survive.

A guy I’ll call Dean posted three times a week for two years. Job photos, a video of a delivery going badly wrong, a Friday note about closing early for a funeral.

His website never once mentioned that any of it existed.

He was waiting to redo the site first. The site was waiting for a quieter month. The quieter month was waiting for whatever quieter months always wait for.

When I checked, Dean counted as a no on social links, and he counted that way for two years. The machine was right, and it was the most misleading no of the lot.

Two halves of a good business that had never once been introduced to each other. Does yours know the other exists?

Check the other direction too. Nonprofits link out better than any sector I audit, at 77.9%, and plenty of those profiles still don’t point back at the website.

“Once I’m posting properly” is a promise made to nobody, with no date on it. What would it actually cost you to link the account tonight, at its current level of embarrassing?

So why does this town win the column?

Nobody has to be asked for permission to link a Facebook page, and that is most of my theory right there.

Every other habit I check comes with a gatekeeper attached to it. Someone has to install the security certificate, someone has to shrink the photographs, someone has to be paid for an afternoon, and the owner sits and waits while it happens.

A social link is a web address typed into a box by whoever has the password, on a Tuesday, in about four minutes. It’s the only item on my whole list an owner can finish personally between two appointments without involving another human being.

Which explains the winners and it explains the stragglers too, because a job that needs nobody also gets assigned to nobody, and the ones who never did it aren’t short of money. They’re short of a person whose job it was.

Most of what keeps a website alive works the same way, a list of small jobs nobody has been handed.

Whose job is it at your place? Have you ever said that out loud to the person you were thinking of?

What the icons are sitting next to

The city writes a bit of its own stuff, too. 38.2% of the sites here publish a blog, a shade over the 37% I get everywhere else.

Add up all ten of my checks, weighted the way I always weight them, and Indianapolis lands on 73 out of 100.

Middling overall, propped up in part by the one habit on the list that costs nothing.

Most of the sites I get handed in this town already have the icons on them, so when I rebuild one for a business here the social half of the job is twenty minutes of clicking and deleting. It isn’t design work and I don’t charge like it is.

If you’d rather not go rooting around in your own footer, send me the address and I’ll tap every icon on the page and tell you where each one landed.

Do one thing with all that

Skip the ranking. Skip the four excuses, including the two I just told you were fair.

The photo from four o’clock: put it up today, on whichever account your website already points at.

If your site points nowhere yet, post it anyway and sort the link out on Sunday. A link is five minutes for whoever built the thing, and it’s worth nothing at all until there’s something alive on the other end of it.

You did the hard part at four o’clock, in the dust, with your thumb in the shot.

Go and post it.