Have you been blogging for a little while but it seems like nobody else is sharing your blog posts except you? This could be due to the fact that you don’t have any social sharing tools installed. These are usually plug-ins, especially in WordPress.

You add them to your website, which makes it easier to share your content on Social Media. Without them, your visitors would have to copy and paste the URL, i.e. the web address of your blog post into the Social Media Platform where they want to share it. The harder it is for people to share your content, the less likely they are to do so.

If all they have to do is press a button, where they simply get either a Tweet, Facebook post or LinkedIn update pre-loaded with the headline and a link to your page, then it is much more likely that they are going to share your content.

You will have seen those social sharing tools all over the place. They are usually either above or below the blog post. Sometimes it’s a floating bar on the side, which lists a number of social media platforms. It shows things such as ‘like’, ‘share’, ‘tweet’, ‘pin’ or whatever the action is that is associated with that social media platform.

Why Should You Install Social Sharing Tools?

Social sharing tools are really good for increasing traffic, because whenever somebody else shares your content on their profile or on their page, it increases the chance that somebody else will see that content. Hopefully, these new people will be interested in it, click and come to your website.

How Do Social Sharing Tools Work?

As I said before, the updates that created this way are usually pre-loaded posts most often showing the headline from your article and the link. Sometimes the name of the tool is also added, so it might say “via Shareaholic” or via (name of tool) that is being used. You can always edit the post before you press send – you don’t have to take it as it is. You can add hash tags if that is suitable. You can add a little comment such as ‘great little article I found about (topic)’ and so you can really personalise the posts. It is a good idea to limit the social media platforms that are shown with every post, you don’t want to choose every platform under the sun. Just use the mains ones where you ‘hang-out’, where you have your tribe already there. Maybe add one other that you are toying with the idea of going on to.

So where is a good position for those social media sharing tools to sit?

You can either go with top or bottom; personally I would suggest top and bottom, rather than either/or, especially if your articles are slightly longer. It saves people from scrolling all over the place to try and find your social media buttons.

Or you can use a floating bar on the side, which if somebody scrolls down the page it simply moves with the position where they are currently reading. When they feel like sharing, no matter where they are in your post, they simply ‘click’ on the relevant button.

Some Useful Tips

Another important thing to mention is to use a tool that you can customise – one that allows you to select the social media platforms you use. You don’t want it to give you a certain set that you cannot edit, let’s say it has Google+ in there, which you simply don’t use, then you want to be able to delete that from the list and have something else instead, such as Pinterest, that you know you get some traffic from.

You also want the position on the page to be customisable. Some of them are fixed, so I probably would suggest you use those unless it’s in the position where you want it to be.

What else should be customisable? How about the text that is being displayed in the updates? So do you want the headline to be present? Do you maybe want a certain hashtag to be added every time?

Make also sure that you can choose which pages and posts are shared and the buttons don’t simply appear on all your pages. On some pages you simply might not want them. You want to make sure you have control over where the buttons are shown.

I have created free resource for you: it’s a downloadable PDF that gives you the top 5 current social sharing plugins for WordPress. So if you have a WordPress website or blog then this resource will come in really handy for you. Simply click the link below to download.

And if you have found this article useful why not use one of the sharing tools on this page to share it on social media.