Social Media is one of the most powerful tools for promoting your WordPress website, and to truly get the most viral lift you need to make it as easy as possible for people viewing your site to share its content with their friends on social networks.
The problem is that more and more WordPress social plugins are added to the WordPress plugin depository each day, so which ones should you use?
Below I have compiled a list of some of my favourite WordPress social plugins, that will provide you with various different features and styles for you to customize the social buttons on your site the way you want.
1. Facebook Like
With so many people using Facebook all over the world, it is one of the most powerful marketing tools for your WordPress blog. This plugin will allow you to place a Facebook Like button (or Recommend button) in your pages and posts. You can choose whether to add this before your content, above your content or both.
Overall Facebook Like is simple and straightforward to use.
2. Addthis
One of the best and most widely used WordPress social plugins, it gives you several options for the layout of your sharing buttons. In most cases the Facebook and Twitter sharing buttons will be focussed on along with the “Addthis” button which enable your blogs readers to share your content on 295+ sharing services.
You can also sign up for a free Addthis account which will then give you access to an analytics dashboard on the Addthis website, which will show you exactly how your content is being shared, for example – what services are being used to share your content, which pages are the most popular and how many clicks you are getting from when your content is shared.
Addthis also made it to my list of best WordPress plugins and is now one of the first services to support the Google +1 button. – I consider Addthis a must have WordPress plugin.
3. AddToAny
Another plugin ranking high on my list of WordPress social plugins, although while it’s buttons don’t look as fancy as ShareThis or Addthis, it has additional features that set it apart from other plugins. One of these features is the smart menu, this means that it will place the services that visitors use at the top of the menu, making it easier for users to share on their favourite sharing service.
Addtoany also allows you to share to over 100 different services, so it’s a lot more than ShareThis, but not as many as Addthis, but come on the 295+ services that Addthis share to is probably a little over kill anyway. Another great feature is that you can integrate this AddToAny plugin with your Google Analytics account, which makes viewing the analytics for your website that bit simpler as everything will be in the same place. All in all this is a great plugin, not as flashy as some, but has a lot going on under the hood.
4. Share This
Another very widely used sharing button, like the Addthis WordPress plugin, ShareThis gives you access to an analytics dashboard, on the downside it takes slightly more time to setup and the information isn’t laid out as straight forward as with the Addthis Analytics dashboard. Also the ShareThis plugin will only allow sharing to 50+ services at this time, compared to the 295+ that Addthis allows, but whether this will actually have an impact is debatable, because over 50 sites is quite a lot anyway in my opinion.
5. Socialize
This plugin allows you to add social sharing buttons in two different ways, either in-line or in a call to action box which is positioned below your post, all the major social bookmarking sites are covered with this plugin and you get a lot of customization options with the call to action box so the sky is the limit with the ability to add your own custom CSS here , on the downside there is currently no form of analytics for this plugin unlike AddThis, AddToAny and Share This so the only thing you’ll see is a straight up count of how many shares you’ve had on the various different services.
6. Tweet2download
If you want to make your content go viral then this is the WordPress social plugin to do it with. It enables you to exchange a download of a piece of content for a tweet and a follow on twitter.
7. Digg Digg
I thought I would save the best till last with this plugin. You may have seen a lot of websites, especially those running WordPress displaying rather smart social bookmarking buttons for services like Google+1, Twitter, Facebook and Stumbleupon etc and this is the plugin that most people are using for it. Digg Digg gives you the options for you to insert these social sharing buttons into your homepage, posts, pages, archive pages etc and directly into your theme with a straight forward shortcode, it also allows for you to display social media buttons floating either on the left or right side of your site.
You can completely customize how your buttons are displayed, vertically or horizontally, which buttons are displayed and in what order and is even compatible with not only the official Twitter button, but also the Topsy and Tweetmeme buttons.
Thank you for taking the time to read, and I hope you will find at least some of these WordPress plugins useful on your own site.
Are you using any of these WordPress social plugins? or are there any other plugins that your using that work well? let us know in the comments.
Pingback: AudiocastProductions
Pingback: WP Goat