How to add social media buttons to wordpress posts
For those who hope to make some cash from their blog, learning how to market your content is absolutely essential, and social media is one of the most important elements of online marketing. You will likely already have noticed social media sharing buttons on many other blogs and websites. These allow people to share content which they like on their favourite social media services at the click of a button. For example, if someone wants to share a blog post that they like with their Facebook friends, all they should need to do is click on the Facebook icon accompanying the post. Adding social media buttons to your blog will make it quicker and easier for people to share your content. WordPress does not provide this functionality by itself, but through the use of a plugin, you can have social media sharing buttons automatically added to all of your existing posts as well as all future ones. Although there are several plugins which add this functionality, we will be using the plugin “Social Bookmarks” for this guide.
- Log in to your WordPress administrator dashboard and open the “Plugins” section from the sidebar followed by “Add New”.
- Type “Social Bookmarks” and click “Search Plugins”. The Social Bookmarks plugin should appear in the top of the results. Click “Install Now” to install the plugin and click “Activate Plugin” once it has been installed.
- A new menu item entitled “Social” will now appear in the sidebar. Click on this to configure your blog’s social media sharing buttons.
- Click on “Options” to configure the plugin. Enter a different display title and tooltip title if you wish. You may also want to disable the sharing buttons on certain static pages of your website, such as the About page. Do this by highlighting the pages in the list provided. Click “Update Options” to save your changes..
- By default, only a few social media buttons for the most popular social networks will be displayed, although the plugin supports dozens more. You can choose which buttons will be displayed by clicking on the “Bookmarks” section in the Social page. Select the ones you want and click “Update Options”. Only select the most popular social media networks, such as Facebook and Twitter as well as those which are most relevant to your website or ones which you use yourself. Choosing too many will confuse readers by cluttering up your page footers.
