Social Media Plugins for WordPress
Here are some of the best plugins that can help you integrate all of your social media campaigns into your WordPress blog. There are loads available of course, since social media is all the craze…but check out below only those that are generally bug free, easy to use and effective.
Twitter WordPress Plugins
Twitter Tools is a great tool that hooks up your WordPress blog and your Twitter account. New blog posts are automatically tweeted, with a standard introductory line of your choosing.
Twitter for WordPress has a neat sidebar widget, that shows your Twitter accounts latest tweets. Ace.
Social Bookmarking Plugins
These plugins take care of the Diggs, Stumbles, Facebooks and Reddits of the world, so there’s no need to have separate plugins for each social media network/platform.
Sociable / BlogPlay is a classic social plugin, tried, tested and excellent. Again it includes on posts or pages the option to share with the world. You just need some content worth sharing that inspires users to do that extra click.
Social Bookmarks gives a list of image links after each post (can be excluded according to page/post via admin area) to let visitors submit the post link to the usual suspects of social bookmarking/media websites. Pretty straight forward plugin, no configuration needed really (apart from activation!).
Share This and Add To Any fill a similar function to those previously shown, but try Social Bookmarking or Yoast’s Sociable before resorting to these last two, which can be a frustration when hovering over them for the user.
Social Media Performance
Social Traffic Monitor will let you know how many people are arriving to your site from social media platforms – broken down to the hour – which is handy if you submitted your latest post and want to monitor the impact relatively ‘live’.
Social Media Signup
WP Greetbox to welcome visitors from social platforms – a really great way to get email signups and feed followers.
Your Own Social Platform
BuddyPress is a great tool that lets you set up your own social network within your site. Relatively young in its life, but absolutely brilliant, easy to use and worth testing just to see how you could use it. Super modern look as well. Forget MyFace…
This list is by no means exhaustive, but a pretty fair start. Remember not to go overboard on social plugins, try them out, test the results. Too many social plugins can be a nuisance on a page, as well as slowing down page load speed.
That said, social media and blogging go from strength to strength – integration of the two has to be considered. Social integration also can bring life to a blog, with live updates from Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, or the others keeping visitors coming back.
