One of the most important items you can add to your website or WordPress blog is a social media share widget. These widgets give your visitors an instant way to tell their own friends about a web page or blog post they find interesting. This is turn increases your readership without any effort on your part.
For example, if I’m reading a news article and want to let my Facebook friends know about it, I just click the Facebook icon in the widget, write a comment, and it’s automatically sent to my Facebook account, where it’s displayed with a link to the original web page.
Sharing widgets come in various sizes and shapes. They can be added to the footer of a site or installed in a sidebar. Most allow you to choose larger or smaller icon sizes. Two of our favourites are Shareaholic and Add This.
SHAREAHOLIC (SEXY BOOKMARKS)
Shareaholic allows you to select from dozens of social media icons. In the following example, 10 icons including Facebook and Twitter were selected to show. Because these icons take up quite a wide amount of space, this widget is most suitable for the bottom of wide web pages.
If you’re logged into one of your social media accounts right now, try clicking the real icons at the bottom of this post and see how the comment box comes up. You could even go ahead and share this article then visit your account to see how it appears.
ADD THIS is a tiny and more conservative version. We use it in footers where there isn’t a lot of space, or for sites that don’t want to draw a lot of attention to the share widget. We also use it when the share widget needs to be displayed in a sidebar.
By default, Add This shows icons for Facebook, Twitter, send by email, and print the page.
If the visitor clicks the orange “plus” sign, a small window opens with a choice of more than 300 other ways to share the web page:
There are dozens of social media share widgets available. Link to the following posts for reviews of other widgets and plugins with descriptions of how they function. It’s a whole new world.
WordPress Sharing Plugins
http://webdesignledger.com/tools/10-best-wordpress-sharing-plugins-of-2012-to-get-more-social-traffic
75+ Great WordPress Social Network Plugin Collection
http://www.tripwiremagazine.com/2012/06/wordpress-social-network-plugin-collection.html
Top 25+ Best Social Bookmarking And Sharing Widget/Button For Blogger
http://www.onsecrethunt.com/2012/02/top-25-best-social-bookmarking-and-sharing-widgetbutton-for-blogger.html
