How to Add Social Media to Your WordPress Website
Making your site easily shareable across social media is pretty important. The last thing you want to do is make your readers go through a series of steps just to share your work across social media.
Plus, including social media sharing buttons across your blog will help add social proof to your posts, especially if they’ve received a significant amount of social shares.
Below you’ll learn five different ways you can incorporate social media sharing into your existing WordPress site.
1. Adding Share Buttons to a Post
One of the most common places to add social media sharing buttons to your site is on the left-hand side of your post. These buttons are very easy to access and typically scroll alongside your post as the user reads, encouraging them to share.
One of the best plugins for accomplishing this is called Sumo. This plugin is equipped with tons of features that will help you improve your site’s traffic and grow your list. If you’re looking to get more traffic to your site and improve social sharing, this is a plugin you’ll want by your side.
You can customize which buttons you’d like to appear. Plus, the buttons automatically adjust to different screen sizes.
2. Adding Share Buttons to the Top and Bottom of a Post
If the sidebar social sharing icons aren’t for you, or you’d like to add social share buttons to even more locations throughout your site, then you’ll want to use a plugin called Social Warfare.
This plugin makes it easy to add social media sharing buttons to a wide range of locations across your site, including the top and bottom of each of your posts.
The buttons look appealing. There’s also a built-in shoe counter that will showcase the number of total shares and shares across each respective network.
3. Adding Social Media Icons to Your Menu
If you have extra space in your website’s menu, then maybe you’d like to maximize that real estate by adding select social media icons.
To accomplish this you’ll want to install the Menu Social Icons plugin. This plugin will give you the option to include social media buttons as links within your navigation menus.
After the plugin is installed you’ll be able to choose from the list of social media icons. This plugin handles each of the logos as a font, which makes it easy to add the logos to your navigation menu without any custom coding required.
4. Embedding an Instagram Gallery
If you have a decent Instagram following or a pretty attractive feed, then you might want to showcase this on your website. There are a variety of plugins you can use to accomplish this, but one of the most popular is Instagram Feed by Smash Balloon.
This plugin will let you do things like include feeds from multiple Instagram accounts, display images in a responsive format, easily customize the layout of your feed, and embed your feed into your site wherever you desire with the included shortcode.
5. Making Your Site Images Easily Sharable
If your site is image heavy, then you’ll probably want to encourage users to share your images on sites like Pinterest. You can accomplish this through a few different plugins. First, you can use the Sumo plugin that we used for social sharing buttons on the first point, or you can utilize a different plugin, like WWM Social Share On Image Hover.
When a users hover over your site’s images social media icons will appear. The social media networks can be customized as well as the alignment of the icons.
Hopefully, the plugins above will help make it much easier for your readers to share your content on social media. You don’t have to utilize every social media plugin highlighted above, but instead the ones most in alignment with the type of user experience you’re offering your visitors.
Any plugins we failed to mention in the list above? Please share your favorites in the comments below.
Kevin Wood writes about technology and human potential. You can find him at his virtual homes Wooden Writing and Counter Culturist.