Social Media Plugins to Spread Your Words

The internet today is all about easy access to information. By adding social media buttons to the posts on your website, you ensure that your readers can share/spread your information easily by whatever means they prefer – whether it be by email, Twitter, Facebook, Digg etc.

How many times have you read a blog post or online article and thought ‘I must tell a friend to read that’ or ‘I must share that with my customers/subscribers’? With a WordPress website, you can easily add social media buttons by adding a simple plugin to your site. Here are my 2 favourite social media plugins and how to add them to your website…

1. Sociable Plugin by Yoast

This plugin gives you a huge number of social networking sites to choose from as well as:

• Email this Post
• Print this Post
• PDF this Post (great for backing up your posts or offering an alternative delivery method)

Download the Sociable Plugin (You should be able to do this inside your Wordpress admin by going to Plugins/Add new and searching for sociable).

Once you have uploaded the plugin to your plugins folder and activated it, go to the Sociable settings page which will appear under your admin Settings menu.

1. Tick the buttons you would like to appear on your website and drag them to the top of the stack in the order you would like them to display.
2. Enter the wording you would like above them in the Tagline box
3. Tick what type of pages you would like them to appear on (I usually choose posts only but if you have a large site with lots of pages of info, you might also tick pages)
4. Tick the open in new window box and save your changes.

You can see this plugin in action on blog posts at

• www.debtforce.co.nz
• www.gettinglippy.co.nz

Customisation TIP: If you want to use different buttons, just name them the same as the ones in the plugin files, change the button size in the style sheet if you need to and upload via ftp.

2. Sexy Bookmarks Plugin

Don’t let the name put you off. If your website doesn’t like the Sociable Plugin (if it is not one of the very latest versions of WordPress or your theme is quite old, the chances are it wont), this plugin is a great alternative. I have used it on my website. The beauty of this one is that you can enter your Twitter username into the settings so the Twitter button becomes a retweet button.

Download the Sexy Bookmarks Plugin ((You should be able to do this inside your Wordpress admin by going to Plugins/Add new and searching for sexybookmarks).

Once you have uploaded the plugin to your plugins folder and activated it, go to the SexyBookmarks settings page which will appear under your admin Settings menu.

1. Enter your Twitter username if you have one.
2. Select where you would like the buttons to appear and what type of pages you would like them to appear on (I usually choose posts only and like them at the bottom)
3. Choose tinyurl as the url shortening service (my favourite one)
4. Select Open in a new window
5. Tick the buttons you would like to appear on your website and drag them to the order you would like them to display.
6. Select wording for above your buttons (I prefer ‘Sharing is Caring’)
7. Save your changes.

You can see this plugin in action on blog posts at

• My website (see below)
• www.ethc.co.nz