The benefits of using social media for building brand awareness, driving traffic, and creating leads are well accepted. However, maintaining and monitoring a coherent content strategy across multiple channels can involve a lot of work. Thankfully, for those with a WordPress site at the heart of their web presence, there are a huge number of plugins to choose from to streamline and automate much of the effort. Today, we’re going to look at 10 of the best.
The Socialize plugin allows sharing buttons from all the major social networks and social bookmarking sites, including Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, and Google Plus to be added to blog posts and web pages. It will also add a call to action at the foot of posts asking users to comment or directing them to participate in a conversation on a chosen social network.
Slick Social Share Buttons is similar in principle to Socialize but adds a bit of UI pizzazz and configurability. The sharing buttons can be displayed either as a floating bar or a slide-out tab, with various options including auto-hide and ability to theme the widget with CSS styles.
Sharexy includes all the usual social media sharing buttons, but with a twist that helps WordPress users monetize their sites. Sharexy will broadcast PPC ads through the widget, paying the website owner for clicks.
All of the above plugins offer some level of analytics for social sharing, but AddThis offers the most comprehensive service, including real time analytics with shares, social traffic, and address-bar tracking.
Creates a widget that displays feeds and profiles from media sites on a WordPress Site. It can display feeds from Google+, Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Flikr and many others.
Disqus and Livefyre are excellent options for blog commenting, but if you want more direct integration with your Facebook page, the Facebook Comments Box allows conversations to bridge the space between a WordPress site and the social network, while allowing users to comment using their Facebook login.
Social will broadcast posts from WordPress to Twitter and Facebook, as well as pulling discussions from those networks and aggregating them with WordPress comments.
Users of Pintrest can share images to their profile directly from a WordPress Site.
Generate traffic for older content by having this plugin Tweet links at preset times automatically.
Cross-Post WordPress blog articles to Google Plus automatically.
Did we miss one of your favorites? Have an opinion on which plugin is superior? Let us know in the comment section below!
