Five Awesome Plugins

How To Enable Social Media Sharing On Your Blog

If you have a WordPress.Org blog like this one you have a choice of hundreds of thousands of plugins. Some of them work, some of them don't, some are great, others are...crap. Since we are mainly interested in Social Media integration, we set out to test a large number of plugins designed to enable sharing and other social media related features. You can see quite a few of them in action on this blog (click here if you are reading this on some other page). Three of the plugins we liked best and have been on this site performing well are listed below in our Social Media Plugin Top 3:

1. and 2. Meebo Bar & Wibiya Bar: Powerful And Simple To Use

Meebo Bar and Wibiya Bar are application bars that sit at the top or bottom of your page. They are completely customizable and allow you to select buttons/features to add to them including feeds from your Twitter, Facebook, Buzz or other profiles and third party applications. You can use them to generate traffic to your Facebook Fanpage, show off your Twitter stream etc. etc. They even come with a Drag To Share option, translations and search options. The Wibiya bar is fully customizable so you can select colors, positions and more. Another great thing about it is that you can deploy it to your regular website as well as your blog. The many choices you can make in creating your Wibiya Bar or Meebobar make it truly unique and your own. Most of the procedure to create it is made up of simple Dragging and Dropping of function buttons and other easy multiple choice selection options. It takes a little experimenting with the number of buttons, and the right color for your site but don't worry: even if you change your mind later on you can change settings at Meebo or Wibiya and they will take effect on all your sites almost instantly.

Get the Meebo Plugin
Get Wibiya

3.Digg Digg

At the top of each post on this blog you will see a small selection of icons that you can click to share the content of that post. This functionality is provided by the Plugin Digg Digg. We have only implemented a limited selection of all the possible options of Digg Digg because we have so many other social media plugins a nd feautures but this plugin in itself could be enough to make your blog social media ready. It features many advanced functionalities, a large selection of sites and the option to place it in different positions, relative to posts or pages.

Visit the Digg Digg WP Plugin page

4.Sexy Bookmarks by Shareaholic

Could Have Been number One in this list if not for some stability issues. shareaholic has great products such as browser addins and Sexy Bookmarks is a great product too. You can see it below each post if you mouse over the post. Or can you? Most of the time: you can but sometimes it doesn't appear in the right position or fails to appear. We keep it on the site because when it does it looks awesome! Basically what it is is a set of customizable buttons that if you mouseover them slide up. You choose between hundreds of buttons and add one or multiple rows. You can select a background image and set many advanced options. It's up to you wether you think it's worth the risk of installing this great plugin. Below you will find some resources that will help you evaluate that risk.

Download and Installation Guide

More useful tools by Shareaholic

Users of Sexy Bookmarks discuss issues on this forum

Blogpost by creators discussing future plans with Sexy Bookmarks

5.Social Slider

Social Slider is a great plugin because it combines a straightforward appearance with powerful options and usualy does what it's supposed to. It looks like a very straight forward tool but behind the simple facade you will actually find a great number of options. You can change position, color, button-styles and more. And you can add as many of your social media accounts as you want. Ofcourse if it works as well for you as it does for us: you will have to find out by trying it.

Learn More At Social Slider Plugin Page

Many,many more Plugins

There are many more social plugiins for WorPress.org blogs. You can search for them from the Plugin page of your WordPress.org installation and activate them from there or go directly to the WordPress plugin site to find Plugins, installation notes and more. You can download Plugins from the site but in that case you will have to upload an unzipped package to your WordPress Plugin directory listing on your FTP server. Start browsing for Plugins...