10 Social Media Widgets That Can Increase Your Blog’s Traffic
Nov 09 2009 
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As social media continues it’s world domination around the globe, more and more sites are starting to integrate some really neat social media plugins on their blogs. Having one of these widgets or plugins on your blog can make it easy for old and new readers to share your content with friends without any hassles or extra steps. They’re an important key to blogs that have gone wildly popular within several social media communities, SheGeeks.net included.
Social Media Buttons and Widgets
- You’re going no where without integrating a plugin that connects with the King of social media, Facebook’s share widget is a must-have on every blog. Go integrate it right now and come back for more! There’s also an alternative Facebook sharecount button that is not affiliated with Facebook, but works just the same.Recommendation: Jesse Stay (@Jesse), CEO of SocialToo, has also created a Facebook Share Button. Thanks to Mark Krynsky!
- A retweet button is without a doubt, one of the most important buttons you can place in new content. They are everywhere, including here on SheGeeks.net. Two services with retweet button support are Tweetmeme and Topsy.
- If you’re blog is most news focused and you don’t mind some major Digg traffic, don’t make another post without the Digg This button on your blog!
- StumbleUpon offers a wide variety of promotion buttons to encourage visitors to recommend your site to their StumbleUpon community. These are especially good to integrate if you discover a lot of new services or tools for people to share with others.
- Do you cater your content to women more than anyone else? There’s no better badge to display than Kirtsy This! You’re missing out if your content is geared towards women and you’re not involved in the Kirtsy community.
- Another community that loves to share lists is the Delicious social bookmarking community. So be sure you’re adding the Delicious Save buttons to your lists posts.
If you’re constantly targeting more than one community and have a wide variety of supporters, integrating all of the buttons above will make your blog posts seem cluttered with unnecessary widgets. Instead of adding everything, pick 1 – 2 of the communities that your content targets the most. Let those buttons display loud and proud on your content.
Social Media WordPress Plugins
To cover other communities, I recommend checking out these social media plugins, that are easily integrated into your blogs and support a wide variety of communities and services that your readers can choose to share to. Think of them as a social media buffet.
- Socialable
- SexyBookmarks (see “share the wealth” below)
- AddThis
- ShareThis
Bonus: Drag to Share!
This is an amazing plugin that mimics the creative sharing functionality on Mashable. Drag-to-Share allows you to drag any media on the page to share to a particular social community such as Twitter, Delicious, and Facebook. Check out the plugin in action here!
Benefits Of Social Sharing Widgets
These social media buttons, widgets and plugins are super easy to install. They’re also well worth the time investment of 5 minutes to install, as they’re more likely to help you increase your blog’s traffic and can cause your content to go viral more swiftly. It let’s these communities know that you also care about providing great information to the members and participants of the community.
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Nice post Corvida with some great advice. I also wanted to point out that Jesse Stay wrote a WordPress plugin for the Facebook Share button. You can find it here.
Thanks Mark! Corvida, if you decide to try it out let me know if you have any troubles.
Thanks for the tip Mark. I added into the post.
Great post. Keep up the good work.
Angela
http://www.javasocialnetworking.com
What are the best bookmarking sites? How many posts should you trackback?
I use the AddtoAny widget on my blog. It's similar to AddThis and ShareThis in that people can add to just about any social media site via that one tool. It has the added feature that they can also email it or bookmark it.
I'm curious if you think people should add more than an all-purpose widget. I don't want to overwhelm the page with widgets, but of course I also want results. What do you think?
Thank you.
I use a mixture of both. Having an all-purpose sharing widget at the bottom of the post helps to engage your readers from communities that you may not be very active in. I use the Tweetmeme plugin because it focuses on social community I am most active in. So a mixture of plugins that cater to where you're really active, and where your readers might be active can help.
I agree, it can get overwhelming which is why I use Tweetmeme at the top and an all-in-one towards the comments.
I find Diigo and Delicious to be the creme of the crop when it comes to social bookmarking sites. And I would hope you're using a blogging platform such as wordpress, or social commenting platform like Disqus to track ALL of your trackbacks ;)
I definately need to use Disqus more. Thanks, Corvida.
Should check out the new offering from AddThis. Its called Sharebar. Very cool!
Should check out the new offering from AddThis. Its called Sharebar. Very cool!
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i find that the buttons are only useful once hyou have steady traffic, if you have little to none you must go out and network.