4 plugins to share your posts on social networking sites
It's weird how everyone wants to know the same thing at once: today's question (it's been asked by three separate people) is "how do you get those little links for Facebook and Twitter on the bottom of your posts?" There are any number of ways to add individual site buttons to your posts, but here are four plugins that make it easy for you and link to a whole bunch of different networks at once.
Share This
Share This is the most complex of my four: it's so much more than just a plugin, and can be used with WordPress, Blogger and Typepad blogs as well as with any other web page. It also provides stats and analysis of how people are sharing your posts across 46 support social networking sites plus email. There are a variety of options for how the Share This link appears, based around either the standard green Share This icon, or an animation that cycles through icons for each available network.
I like the stats, baby. I'm not reliant on extrapolating from Google Analytics with this one: I can see exactly how people are sharing my content. Nice.
I don't like the recognisable icons being hidden behind a pop-up window. Sure, there's an animation, but if people miss that, the "Twitter this" icon isn't in their face enough to remind them to do it. I don't think the green icon is standard enough (yet) to prompt too many people to click it.
Sociable
Sociable is a bit less complicated. It's a neat WordPress plugin with a sweet drag-and-drop backend that means you can arrange some or all of 94 sites plus email in any way you like. Sociable's the one I'm using on this site, and it's the one I keep coming back to.
I like that the actual icons are visible, and that I can add extra sites to it myself, though with 94 already included, I'm hard-pushed to find any that have been missed out. I like that I can control which ones appear and which ones don't.
I don't like the default CSS which decreases the opacity of the icons on the default display - though it's easy enough to edit the included stylesheet. And stats would make it absolutely perfect.
AddThis
This was the sharing plugin of choice for the PopJudaica blog. You can choose either an ultra-compact button with two layers of pop-up (the first with your choice of more popular ways to share, and the second with 49 different networks, browser-bookmark, add to Amazon Wishlist, or print), or a larger button with some network logos already visible.
I like the neat button graphic - it invites clicking.
I don't like that the customisation options rapidly become horribly complex.
Bookmarkify
I must confess I only found Bookmarkify in the course of writing this post. It says it has more than 50 site options plus email. And it looks pretty good: the combination of your choice of visible icons plus a "more" link to pop-up the rest seems to combine the best of each of the three options above. And you can use it either as a WP plugin or standalone on any PHP page. So I can't tell you what I like (or don't) about this in practice, but I'll be trialling it next.
Bonus plugin: the Tweetmeme button
Let's face it: some social networking sites are more equal than others. Twitter's pretty hot. And so is Tweetmeme's button, which not only allows your readers to retweet your post in one click, but also shows a live count how many times it's already been retweeted.
Are you using any of these? What's your favourite? Leave us a comment.
Tags: plugins, social networking
i have been usin the "Share This" plug-in, but after reading your article i think i am going to start using the "retweet" plug-in as well. i see it in many blogs and i always wanted to add it but always something else kept me from doing it. but now i dont have any excuses, since there is a link to go to it and downloaded right away. so thank you for this. great post.
Sociable is probably the best one in terms of functionality and looks, but it doesn't validate, so the minute it's installed, it breaks validation rules :/