10 Best Social Plugins for WordPress

Although Tumblr has overtaken WordPress for having more blogs on the web, many websites choose WordPress for its unmatchable usability, customizable layouts and outright professional feel. One of the many joys of using WordPress are the thousands upon thousands of plugins you can easily add to your website. There are a lot of plugins focused on your social media needs, however choosing the right one’s for your website can be difficult with such a huge selection. Here are 10 recommendations for social media related WordPress plugins: 1. Facebook Open Graph Meta in WordPress: The Open Graph Protocol is one of Facebook’s newer features that allows you to customize the way in which the content from your website appears in Facebook after its been liked via Facebook’s Like button. The typical way of defining this shared content from your website is by adding specific meta tags to each of the pages of your website that feature the Facebook Like button, however you can easily define the way in which the info about a particular page should be shared with this plugin as well. This is a much easier way of taking advantage of the Open Graph without having to add meta tags to your website, once again highlighting the unbeatable usability of WordPress. 2. Facebook Social Plugins: This wonderful social plugin is actually a couple Facebook plugins all wrapped together as one WordPress plugin. This addition to your website/blog can allow you to add the Like button, the Activity feed, Comments widget, the Like Box and Recommendations. The Like button and the Like box are the most important aspect of this tool because they help share your content on Facebook and convert your website traffic into Facebook fans. This bundle will help save the time and effort of adding multiple Facebook plugins by just installing one WordPress plugin. 3. WP Social Toolbar: The point of all these WordPress social plugins is to make it easier for visitors to share content on your website and for you as a website owner to setup these features quickly and effectively. The WP Social Toolbar does just that and more. This toolbar is completely customizable allowing you to display your latest tweet, tweet your content on Twitter, like your Page on Facebook and display links to all your social media accounts. There is a variety of color and font options, all of which are modern looking and able to match your website’s design. Lastly, you define whether it shows up on your entire website, blog, only on your home page or on specific individual pages. 4. ShareThis: This is one of the most common WordPress plugins used for social sharing. It gives you the option to share from a variety of platforms on a plethora of different styled and sized buttons. You can choose from horizontal count buttons, vertical count, classic buttons, buttons without text and more. It gives you the option to choose whether these social icons shares per post, on all your posts, per page and in variety of other combinations of your choosing. 5. WP Tweet Button: Soon after Twitter released their own official Tweet button, many sites adopted it as their Twitter plugin replacing the commonly used 3rd party Twitter tweet and retweet plugins. A common way of adding this to your website is by adding the custom HTML code, but once again WordPress has it covered. This Twitter plugin for WordPress allows you to add the plugin to your blog and/or website with the ability to define what it shares on Twitter, where the button appears on your site, the style of the Tweet button and much more. Add this plugin and share your content with your online audiences on Twitter quickly and easily. 6. Twitter Follow Button: Not too long ago, Twitter debuted a Follow button to the public. This social plugin allows you to follow a particular Twitter account from a website, rather than visiting Twitter to do so. The WordPress plugin gives you the option of adding this button to your blog without having to deal with adding code to your back end. This plugin is great for getting your website visitors to connect with your Twitter account and see your network on this platform. 7. Wickett Twitter Widget: Many organizations like to show their Twitter streams on their website to give visitors a sample of the type of conversations they are having and the type of content they are sharing on Twitter. Once again, Twitter offers the code to install such a widget but there’s always an easier way when it comes to WordPress. By installing this plugin you can customize the number of tweets displayed, filter out @ replies and include retweets. 8. Smart YouTube: YouTube videos can easily be embedded into your pages and posts on WordPress without a plugin, but the Smart YouTube plugin helps streamline the process. This plugin helps set customizations to the way in which the videos are embedded, helping ensure consistency in the way YouTube videos are added to your website by your entire organization. The video settings, appearance, custom code compatibility, xHTML validation and the RSS feed options can all be set ahead of time, which is especially helpful for websites posting lots of content and with many people publishing the content. 9. The Google +1 Plugin: With the launch of Google+, the +1 button has gained more legitimacy as a social plugin. It still remains to be seen how this social network will fare against Facebook and Twitter, but nevertheless it’s important to incorporate Google+ into your online marketing efforts. Add this WordPress plugin to include the +1 button on your website, while also being able to fully customize it to share your favorite URL’s in Google+ and in Google search results. 10. Social Metrics: Adding this WordPress plugin allows you to quickly view how your various posts and pages on your WordPress site are performing in social networks. It’s a quick and organized way of viewing what content was shared the most on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Google Buzz, StumbleUpon, Digg and LinkedIn. It’s important to have the Twitter, Facebook and the other most common social plugins on your site for the best results with this social metrics plugin. Brian Honigman is the Social Media Account Manager at LunaMetrics, a Google Analytics certified partner that also specializes in social media, search engine optimization and PPC. You can follow him on Twitter @Brian_Honigman or @LunaMetrics.

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10 Best Social Plugins for WordPress

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