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You don’t have to look hard to find info on the growth of social media. From Facebook to Twitter, social media sites can be linked from blogs or websites to increase traffic.
You can find widgets and plugins that connect social media site to blogs and websites all over the place. In February and March of 2010, Facebook had more unique hits than Yahoo or Google, pulling in over 7 percent of all web traffic.
Since social media dominates the Internet world, not having at least one social media plugin installed is foolish.
Any one of these five great widgets for drawing social media traffic to your website or blog will make it easier for your readers to share your content with their friends.
1. ShareThis
ShareThis is a WordPress plugin that allows your WordPress blog visitors to post their favorite content from your site directly to a range of social bookmarking sites.
Or to send a link via their e-mail address to social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace.
2. Hocus Pocus Buttons
Hocus Pocus Buttons is another great WordPress plugin that gives you an easy to use sidebar widget for social bookmarking and networking use. One of the widest range of button options of any social networking plugin, Hocus Pocus is limited by the fact that only buttons corresponding to social media sites that visitor has been to will show up.
The idea behind this is to avoid disturbing your visitors with too many useless buttons or unfamiliar links, and instead to give them only those options they already use.
3. Gregarious
Looking for a social bookmarking plugin that incorporates multiple widgets? Gregarious brings together the new Digg API as well as the Share This plugin, along with Reddit functionality and Feedflare. The result is a single powerful widget that’s both easy to use and attractive.
Thanks to an AJAX interface, you can easily customize this widget to your social media needs. Set up as a module plugin, Gregarious can be packed with as many or as few features and link abilities as you want.
4. SocioFluid
SocioFluid – Featuring icons and links for many major social bookmarking websites (such as Digg, Reddit, del.icio.us, dzone, stumbleupon, blinklist, blogmarks, furl, newsvine, technorati, and Facebook) with even more being added all the time, may have the most adaptable social media linking system available.
A cool feature — when the user’s mouse touches or hovers over the icons, they grow larger than the other text for ease of use. You don’t have to use every available media site either, you can easily choose the ones you want to display.
5. Social Dropdown
Tired of cluttered social media widgets? The Social Dropdown plugin puts a number of social bookmarking options into a drop down menu that keeps the usual widget clutter off your blog or website.
Conclusion
Although there are many social media widgets available for use, one has to make sure that it’s easy to use and style if need be. It doesn’t help having 4 WordPress plugins that do the same, simplify and rather use one that caters for all your needs.
Louise Baker is a freelance writer and online journalist. She currently writes about online degrees for Zen College Life.
View all posts by Louise, there might be other posts that interest you.
{ 27 comments }
Tried ShareThis before and failed. Seem like my readers don’t like to share stuffs.
@Jayce – I seem to agree with what your readers think. I personally don’t like it and never even tried to install it here on my blog. Somehow it does not appeal to me, lol
I am using Addtoany. It works great for me.
@Paul – great to know. As being a IT programmer and having come to terms with coding for Thesis theme, I have created my own admin options page whereby one can select which social icons to show and also have control over the CSS styling of the icons.
I wonder if those statistics include smartphone apps from iPhones, Blackberries, ect. Social networking sites are very accessible because of smartphones.
Don’t forget Wibiya! I favor Wibiya because you don’t have to use it on wordpress blogs. My personal site uses Tumblr and i’ll be adding it soon.
I have tried the first one and now stick with Digg Digg. The other 4 are new to me. Thanks for listing them out.
P/S: Eblogtip.com was acquired and I am now blogging with this new blog
Wow, SocioFluid seems to be pretty cool. I will use that in my new blog. Thanks a lot for sharing
Currently, I’m using Sociable, but I’ve always wanted something which displays the icons bigger. That SocioFluid set seems cool enough.
@James – glad to be of help, but all thanks should go to Louise for the guest post.
“Add This “is all in one plugin for all the social media sites. I used this plugin earlier, it is gr8 !!
Hey even I tried to use the share this plugin, but it needs some widget code and I am not able to get it from their site, its not loading only
@Pradeep – sorry to hear that, hope you come right otherwise let us know and we might be able to help you out a bit.
Still I am not able to use the plugin
To get the widget code i need to register with their site and once I do that , the site is not responding 
, not sure if its my browser problem or some thing else. I use Google chrome.
@Pradeep – have you tried to contact the developer? Maybe they are experiencing problems and it’s not just you. Let us know if you don’t come right.
hi i know that social media site increase traffic but not back links . i think face book fan page important to increase traffic on your sites. and twitter followers important.
@Carpet Cleaning – Yes, Facebook and Twitter can help as well, many users rely on them and they are sending huge amounts of traffic.
I am using at least 3 of the 5 you listed in here and it works for me well enough. Thanks for getting this list here. By the way, I downloaded your free PLR articles collection to be rewritten for my blogs.
Your great man and with 58,156 Alexa rating, your blog is soaring into the sky.
Congratulations and more power to you!
@AmericanMoneySolutions – thanks for your feedback and for your kind words. Good luck with the PLR articles and hope they help. Just remember to alter it a bit, so that you don’t get penalized by Google for duplicate content.
Gregarious is seem very look nice. I will use it for my blog
ShareThis is the most famous. I saw many bloggers use that =)
Interesting stuff, Impressed
Your blog is awesome and You share great content dude, keep rocking ! I use sociable plugin which is highly customizable with more than 60 social media sites.
@Srivathsan – don’t thank me, thank Louise as she wrote the guest post.
I totally agree with you with those plugins and I been using it and it has good effect on traffic, but you need good content on your website to persuade your readers to bookmark your content.
@Ben – you are correct about content being important. Bad content will not get readers to share or bookmark your website.
Thanks for sharing these plugins; I am going to implement ShareThis. I am confident my traffic will increase
Like all webmasters and SEO experts say, “Content is King”. These tools are very useful if you provide highly-likable content to your website which users are willing to bookmark, pass around, and go back to.
well-written article
I use share this.
So true, Twitter and Facebook do send huge amounts of Traffic. It’s really simple, send enough information that’s really interesting to your viewers.
I would only do that every day, do not get distracted.
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