Top 10 best Social Sharing Plugins for WordPress

Top 10 best Social Sharing Plugins for WordPress

These days, social media are being used for building customer relationship, driving traffic to your website and creating brand awareness as well as leads. Oh, and not forgetting the initial reason for social media’s existence ie to connect with others.

Social sharing plugins

With so much of information flying around the Internet, wouldn’t it be a good idea if you too make the best of the social media to promote your website? Why of course. Next question. How do you do so?

Fortunately for WordPress websites, there are quite a few great social sharing plugins that we can choose from to help us achieve this. Here’s my list of the top 10 best social sharing plugins.

  1. Sharebar

    Sharebar plugins

    Sharebar is definitely one of the most dynamic social sharing plugins currently. Intelligent and has lots of customizable features, Sharebar adds a vertical box to the left of your blog post. This tool allows you to slot selected social media link buttons like Twitter, Facebook, Google Buzz, Digg and a standard email button, into the box.

    What I like most about this plugin is that it “floats” at the side of your posts thus remaining visible as your readers scroll up and down. And should the browser be minimized to a preset size, this vertical box will automatically become a horizontal bar under your post title.

    The settings allows easy customization. You can add / delete and even change the order of the buttons, adjust background and border color as well as disable the plugin from automatically adding the Sharebar to your posts.

  2. Sexy Bookmarks

    Sexy Bookmarks

    This tool is as attractive as its name suggests. It is a breakaway from the traditional buttons-in-a-box bookmarking tool. You can place this social media sharing (and related content widget) tool at the bottom of your posts, pages or index. On top of that, it has a cool hovering effect.

    With over 1.5 million downloads, it’s clearly that this stylish plugin is a winner. It even offers social analytics information like popular pages, referral channels etc as well as official support for Google’s URL shortener.

  3. DiggDigg

    Floating share bar

    DiggDigg is yet another all-in-one social sharing bar which gives you lots of customization choices. For example, you get to add a floating sharing bar on the left of your posts or a normal bar either at the bottom or top of your posts, with a choice of small or big buttons.

    This WordPress plugin has recently been updated and now allows display of not only popular sharing buttons like Twitter, Facebook Share, Digg, LinkedIn, Google +1 but other newer social media features like Pinterest, Designbump and Sphinn. Other features include left or right scrolling effect. There are support in except mode and for email and print services too!

  4. GetSocial

    Get Social

    GetSocial is a lightweight and easily managed social media sharing plugin which places a floating bar on the left side of your pages. While you don’t get the option to place the tool bar anywhere else, the plugin comes with lots of other features to compensate this. Take for example, its ability to auto-adjust itself to screen resolutions and how simple it is to add any social media buttons you desire.

    More importantly, it’s lightweight and thus, doesn’t put a toll on your website speed. This is great when you have other plugins and is concern about your page-load time!

  5. Socialize

    Socialize

    This versatile plugin gives you more freedom in determining where to add social sharing buttons. You can have the normal buttons box below your posts or you can also choose to place them inside your content to be aligned to the left or right.

    Customization ability includes adding messages to the buttons as well as a “Call To Action” box at the bottom of your posts. The later can be used to persuade your readers to subscribe or comment or any other appropriate actions.

  6. AddToAny

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    This is an extremely popular plugin with over 2 million downloads. Why is it so? Well, for one, it has more than 100 sharing and social bookmarking sites on it from popular ones like Facebook, Twitter, StumbleUpon, Google, LinkedIn, Digg, to newer ones like Pinterest and Google +1 to some that you probably have not heard of.

    It is intelligent enough to display only more popular buttons at the first click and the rest with subsequent click. There’s also an Email tab that allowed for sharing via Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Hotmail and any other email program. It is highly customizable and can also be easily integrated with Google Analytics.

  7. ShareThis

    Sharethis WordPress plugin

    ShareThis is a social media plugin that has gained immense popularity in recent years. Lots of options to choose from, for example the type of buttons eg classic style, buttons with horizontal counters and buttons with vertical counters. Sometimes, counters are great to persuade your readers to share too!

    Alternatively, you can choose to have bars eg floating bars on left or right side of page, adding options like Twitter Stream, RSS feeds and trending content or a sharing bar that appears only when your readers scroll down.

    What is great about this plugin is that comes with analytics and can be integrated with Google Analytics and Omniture.

  8. AddThis

    AddThis plugin

    Another great analytics plugin is AddThis. When you sign up for a free unobligated account, you will get to view your readers’ sharing trends, for example, which content is most widely shared and which social media site is popular.

    It provides over 300 social media and bookmarking sites for you to choose from. Plus, they also support address bar sharing on modern browsers. The settings interface comprises of a basic and an advanced tab and are simple to use and manage.

  9. Social Media Widget

    Social media widget

    Instead of the traditional after and before post sharing bar, the Social Media Widget is well, a sidebar widget. It is pretty neat to have, great to look at and adds some excitement to your website.

    There are 3 sizes to choose from but what I like most is the animations. There are 4 types and they vary quite a fair bit in design, thus enabling you to find one that fits your website’s style. Settings is simple and straightforward to use. The social media links open up in a separate browser window, so your readers do not leave your page.

  10. Smart Social WordPress plugin

    Smart social WordPress plugin

    This recommendation is a premium plugin. Costing only $6 though. It lets you easily configure and manage your social media box. It is a professionally designed plugin which display your buttons in an elegant way.

    It is highly customizable and can easily be integrated into your pages. Plenty of options available eg placement position, floating icons or slider (haven’t seen this feature on those free plugins yet), and hovering or not.
    Since you are paying for the plugin, you get extra stuff like technical support and PSD files (in case you want to change images/design).

    Hang on… that’s not all. Yes, I did mention that it’s a top 10 list but I couldn’t resist adding another one more plugin.

  11. SocioFluid

    This is an amazing tool in the sense that it is the only one (so far I couldn’t find any other plugin which does the same) that would display a zooming effect on the share buttons when hovered over, very much like how Mac’s Dock works. You do get lots of goodies like configuring links to be opened in new tabs / windows and customizable CSS style.

    The only drawback is that it was last updated back in 2008, meaning that more recent social media sites like Pinterest are not included and chances are it doesn’t support the latest WordPress version either. But still, I think it has a neat effect that is worth mentioning. Hopefully the author would update it in the near future.

As mentioned above, there are lots of plugins on the Internet. While some are pretty good and reliable (like the list here), there are also some which aren’t so. These could be poorly coded and reduce the speed of your website significantly.

My recommendation is to do a research of the plugins before installing. Will save you lots of trouble later. Do you have any other social media plugins that you find is worth recommending?

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