Tom Brincefield writes at Tom B.’s Rambles,a general topic blog. He is writing a series that takes a regular look at different types of plugins for WordPress blogs. In between those posts, he writes about anything that catches his eye and spends a lot of time reading how-to-blog sites.
Everyone wants links to their blogs and posts. Especially their posts. Some, well okay, most, want the links in order to increase their traffic and therefore their income. The income can come from either ad impressions or selling products on their sites, or increasingly, both.
One of the major ways that people gain links, and get their posts out in the blogosphere, is using plugins that make it easy for their readers to share those posts on the socialsphere, that area of the web that interpenetrates and expands beyond the blogosphere. So here are a few of the many social plugins that can be found for WordPress.
Social Bookmark Services
Add to Any: Share/Save/Bookmark Button has a large list of social sites, with more added to the website constantly. Opening the menu, either by clicking or hovering over the button (7 options, one is provide your own) for the service gives you a menu with 12 options for sharing sites. But you can expand that to every site they offer with the click of a mouse. And if your visitor can’t find the service they want, there is a search bar right there. You can also share by email, either you own email program, one of 5 online services, or through the Add To Any website or you can bookmark/favorite the page.
One nice feature is that places your visitor has been to are at the top of the menu in bold, rather than just the most popular places like Digg or StumbledUpon. Options include whether or not the button appears on your front page, on individual posts and/or pages, and on your feed. You can also place the title of the post on the menu and decide if the reader needs to click to make the menu appear or just hover over the button. The Add to Any website gives instructions for using Google Analytics to see how people are using the button.
AddThis Social Bookmarking Widget currently has 43 services on the list it gives your readers. You can use it on regular html pages, as well as using the plugin for your blog posts and pages. You can list the services you want to show up on your menu, with the reader having option of seeing more, in case they do not see what they want. There are 6 options for what button appears, and limited customization of the colors of the menu. They have an impressive list of languages that you can use on the button.
The plugin that is installed from the WordPress directory requires PHP 5. There is a version for PHP 4 included in the download, but some of the options do not work. You can prevent it from appearing on your pages, but it all or none. And there is no control over where buttons appear, before or after the post. (This is especially annoying, since on their site for the build your own buttons for non-blogs, they advise placing the buttons at the top of the content.)
Addmarx – Bookmark/Share/Email Dropdown feeds a menu to your blog using javascript. It is much more limited on options than Add to Any, only giving you the choice of whether it appears at the bottom of your posts, pages, and on your front page. It also allows you to make a minor change to the color of the menu, but does not allow you to change the gray of the background.
There is a decent list of the social web sites, split into two tabs, one of bookmark services like Google, Del.icio.us, and Yahoo, the other social sites like Facebook and StumbledUpon. There are also two other tabs on the menu, one for emails right from the menu, the other provides a link to the page, ready made to paste into a web page. Not as featured as Add to Any, but still a nice service.
ShareThis is very similar to the other services, offering a large number of links to the prominent social services. They have a large number of options for customizing the pop menu, from the colors, to how many tabs show up, and exactly which services will be available. You change options by going to their site, making your customizations, then copying the generated javascript to a box on the Setting section of your dashboard. They also have reports and analytics on their site about how your buttons are used, if you create a free account.
They only have 39 social sites to choose from, but besides the normal email option, they have the various blogging sites on a different tab, making them easier to find. And the say they will be adding more, as people ask for particular sites. The only two options you control from the setting page are whether the links will show on pages or posts. You can’t control where they show up, or keep them from showing in certain places, like your home page.
Self Contained Plugins
Simple Bookmarking is a newer plugin with limited options. Very limited. As in none. It places a line of 7 social sites at the bottom of your single posts and pages. You have no choice about it appearing, where it appears, or which services it uses. There is good and bad about this, you are stuck with what the author puts in, but you do not have to worry about messing with your dashboard to figure out what to do. The old choice between ease of use and flexibility. For now at least, the author says he is planning on adding more features.
HB Social Bookmarks gives you a widget that goes into your sidebar. This has the advantage that it appears on all of your pages and posts, always in the same place, and it fits into your theme very easily without styling. It uses 16×16 pixel icons for the social sites, with a javascript at the top of the widget that gives the name of the site. It includes the major sites like Facebook, MySpace, Technorati, Digg, and others, as well as some of the smaller ones and one button for bookmarking. And the one option you have is being able to uncheck various icons so they do not show on your site.
Having only the one option is not that bad, since you really do not need to worry about things like what button to use or where to place it. But it does highlight one of the limitations of the plugin. The sites you can have are encoded into the widget, with no way to add more. The author is willing to add more if asked, but that would take time. But for plug and play, ease of use, this is a hard one to beat.
The Sociable plugin by Joost de Valk is very different from the HB Social Bookmarks widget. It is full of options, and it is not possible to put all of the sites it covers on your page. Well, it is possible, but with 102 of them (as of version 3.0.2), the icons will take up more space than some posts. All of the major sites are included, as well as most of the smaller ones and some for various languages. And you can drag and drop the icons into whatever order you want.
You have control over what pages the icons do and do not appear on, including search and archive pages, and you can add the target=_blank to the links so the pages open in a new window. If you are comfortable with coding, you can also add more sites to the plugin, as well as place the icons where you want them on your page. An impressive plugin, with a great deal of flexibility, but still easy to use. It does not cover new social sites as easily as outside services, and you have to pick and choose which sites you want to show, but it does give you a huge amount of control. Just do not pick all of the available social sites.
Sociable Zyblog Edition is a fork off of the same plugin that de Valk’s Sociable plugin started with. This makes their use almost identical, with just a few differences in the two. The deValk version has a few more options for controlling the display, the Zyblog Edition gives you more social sites to choose from. Which means the caution against picking all of them is even more important.
Social Bookmarks is between the Simple Bookmarking and the Sociable plugins in size. There are 50+ included in the plugin you get from the WordPress depository. It give you a new menu right on your dashboard rather than under the Tools or Settings sections. The documentation there is good, and you have decent control about what places the links do and don’t appear. You also get to choose whether you want to have an AJAX menu drop down to display the icons. This comes into play if you want a lot of sites to show up.
You choose your sites, from one to 50+ and they show up under your post. All of the icons under your words would not be all that attractive, but it can be nice to have that many options available. That is where the dropdown menu is nice. When you add in the other very nice thing about this plugin, the menu is almost a necessity. Those are the Site Packs, downloads you can add to the plugin expanding the choices available. This makes updating the social listings much easier. You can make your own Site packs, and they can be in different languages, 4 besides English are already available, helping you focus the choices for your audience. Nice flexibility, very nice expandability, and not too hard to use.
That’s All
Well, not really. There are many more plugins for social sites in the WordPress directory. But it is not possible to cover them all at once. There are more multi-site plugins, and some that are specific to just one site. I will be looking at more of them on my home blog, Tom B.’s Rambles, in my next Plugins post. Which one is right for you is based on many things, like your audience, your comfort level with setting up plugins, and what sites are available on the plugin.
It can be tempting to grab one of them that gives your readers many places to share your post. But too many options can be intimidating, and you have to consider what your particular niche is. Is your site focused on tech stuff and there is a social bookmarking site that focuses on that? Then you will want a plugin that allows you to put that site where your readers can find it easily, along with the more general big name sites.
The most important part of getting visitors to put your posts on the sharing sites, and the hardest, is creating quality content on a consistent basis. All the plugins and widgets created will not get your posts linked to if your readers don’t like it.
