When blogging it is essential to let your readers easily share the content you are producing. With social sharing icons you will thus be aiding your users. In this post we examine some of the most popular options for WordPress.
Sharedaddy
Sharedaddy is a plugin created by Automattic, and if anyone asked us what the best plugin for social sharing is, we would not hesitate in directing them to Sharedaddy. It lets you share your posts with Twitter, Facebook, and a host of other services. You can configure services to appear as icons, text, or both. Some services have additional options to display smart buttons, such as Twitter, which will update the number of times the post has been shared.
The following services are included:
- StumbleUpon
- PressThis
- Digg
Additionally you can define your own custom services.
One of the biggest annoyances of social buttons is that bloggers feel the need to add every social button under the sun.
While adding social buttons is okay, more often than not they are not aligned properly or (worse) they are displayed in different sizes creating an eyesore for readers.
ShareDaddy alleviates this issue by allowing WordPress fans not fluent in geek to easily align their social buttons as well as maintain the proper proportions.
Another great feature about ShareDaddy is the fact that you can easily view which social buttons are sending you the most traffic.
Stats can easily be viewed in your WordPress Stats blog, which can help you determine which buttons should be displayed for your blog and which ones should be sent to the “share this” box.
Despite the popularity of Twitter, Facebook and Digg (assuming the latter is still relevant), you may find other social networks and bookmarking services (like Google Buzz and Evernote) better suited towards your blog.
Instead of hunting down yet another plugin (which will probably display your social button out of alignment), you can easily create a new button by finding a 16 x 16 sized icon and locating the share URL.
Note: Ryan Markel from Automattic has already listed over half a dozen share URL’s from other social networks that you can use.
ShareThis
Used by 850,000 sites, the ShareThis plugin allows users to share your content through email and 50+ social networks including Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Stumbleupon and Google Buzz.
To get more information about the ShareThis plugin for WordPress, visit: http://help.sharethis.com/integration/wordpress
You can customize the ShareThis widget on your site and register with ShareThis (registration is optional) to get access to enhanced share related analytics for your site.
Addthis
Another excellent social sharing plugin is AddThis, which is powered by the Addthis.com online service. Get more traffic back to your site by installing the AddThis WordPress plugin. With AddThis, your users can promote your content by sharing to 295 of the most popular social networking and bookmarking sites (like Facebook, Twitter, Digg, StumbleUpon and MySpace). The Addthis button is small, unobtrusive, quick to load and recognized all over the web.
Optionally, sign up for a free AddThis.com account to see how your visitors are sharing your content: which services they’re using for sharing, which content is shared the most, and more.
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Sexybookmarks
Adds an attractive social bookmarking menu to your posts, pages, index, or any combination of the three. Though the name may be a little “edgy” for some, SexyBookmarks has proven time and time again to be an extremely useful and successful tool in getting your readers to actually submit your articles to numerous social bookmarking sites.
Get Sexybookmarks
AddtoAny
The WordPress plugin to help people share, bookmark, and email your posts and pages using any service, such as Facebook, Twitter, Google Buzz, Digg, Delicious, and well over 100 more sharing and social bookmarking sites. This sharing plugin comes with AddToAny’s customizable Smart Menu, which places the services visitors use at the top of the menu, based on each visitor’s browsing and usage history.
