Today, social media are being used for various reasons such as interacting with customers, getting the target audience to your website and creating brand awareness as well as leads. At the same time you would want your blog visitors to share your content with their family and friends and within their social circles.
And the best way to achieve this is to install a social sharing plugin for WordPress. This makes it easy for your blog visitors to post your link to Facebook, Twitter, Google+, or elsewhere. Social sharing plugins take care of positioning the buttons at the best spot. All you need to do is choose the best social media site that you need to display, choose a spot where you want to display the buttons and save it. The plugin will now display the buttons at the right place on your blog. Below are the best social sharing plugins for your WordPress blog.
1. Digg Digg
Dig-digg is one of the best all-in-one sharing plugins that gives you various customization options. You need not worry about WordPress or php codes. It makes it easy to display any of social media sharing buttons with counts like Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Reddit, Buffer and many more to your WordPress site. You can add the floating bar on the left of your posts or place a normal bar with large buttons at top or normal bar with small buttons at bottom of your posts. The compact and standard alignments of icons give you some great flexibility. Dig-dig is a must use to increase sharing and linking on your blog site.
2. Sharebar
When adding social sharing buttons on your blog, one of the biggest mistakes is misplacement of those buttons. Some web designers feel that buttons added on the top of each post would work better while other experts recommend placing of buttons exactly at the end of a post’s content. Placing buttons at inappropriate spots can adversely affect page load times. Hence, it is better to use the Sharebar plugin for WordPress which is extremely easy to install. The social sharing icons will automatically move as you scroll the article. If a user’s screen resolution is less than 1000pixels, the left share bar will be hidden but will reappear at the end of an article. This feature helps visitors browsing your site from mobile devices to see your social sharing buttons.
3. Add This
Add This is another great social bookmarking widget. It’s free to install and provides robust analytics of users, which is helpful in determining the popularity of pages and content on your site or blog. This plugin allows your readers to bookmark and share your content easily on their social networks like Facebook, Twitter, etc. On activating AddThisPlugin, you are allowed to configure the appearance and position of your social share buttons. In the basic settings choose which icons you would like to display above and below the posts. Add this keeps track of sharing that happens outside of plugins via copy and paste from address bar.
4. Shareaholic
Shareaholic is the best plugin to share your valuable content to Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest and more from anywhere on the web. It provides you with a lot of fantastic features. You can either choose to display the social sharing buttons at the bottom of the post or create a top bar containing social media count buttons. When a reader scrolls down your blog post, this top bar pops up at the top of your screen, increasing the possibility of shares on your content. Another interesting feature of Shareaholic plugin is that it allows you to show related posts at the end of your article. So you need not bother of adding another plugin to display related posts. The recommended content widget located right below your social media buttons allow readers to access more of the content they want to read. The analytics feature will let you know where your visitors are coming from, how many readers have shared your posts and a list of top shares.
5. Slick Social Share buttons
Slick social share buttons is a great way of adding a very attractive floating share button bar at different positions of homepage; post page, category pages etc. It is easy to manage the position of sliding bar. You can set its position anywhere on your page. The plugin also gives you share totals for each page, post and category type. It also allows you to customize the size of social media buttons and display order. You can either choose to display or hide the floating or sticky panel on page load.