Top 10 Social Sharing Buttons for Your Website Software worldbd

Top 10 Social Sharing Buttons for Your Website



One of the best ways to get traffic to your website is through the use of social sharing buttons. The problem, however, is that while many social sharing options exist, their features vary. Some offer fewer sharing options, some only work on WordPress, and some require more technical expertise to install and configure.













Here is a list of 10 social sharing alternatives that I have tested and recommend. A few are plugins designed specifically for WordPress, but others can be used on almost any website.




1. ShareThis



Used by thousands of sites, ShareThis is one of the most popular sharing tools. It is not limited to WordPress either. Practically any site can embed ShareThis buttons.













Many button styles are offered, small to large, and can display social reach numbers — i.e., the number of times a post has been shared. ShareThis also has one of the largest selections of social sites, including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, StumbleUpon and many others. However, one drawback is that it does not support Pinterest.













ShareThis includes the capability for both static and “floating” sharing widgets, in either vertical or horizontal orientations.




2. Socialize






















According to its website, Socialize — a WordPress plugin — was designed to make managing and adding actionable social sharing buttons easier and more efficient.













Buttons can be added either inside a blog post or in a box below. The box contains text that encourages readers to subscribe to the blog and leave comments. Additional text can be included, such as calls to action or product mentions.













Socialize offers 12 of the most popular buttons including Pinterest and Buffer, a relatively new app that enables readers to schedule sharing times in order to increase reach and visibility.




3. AddThis

































AddThis functions in a manner similar to ShareThis.































AddThis works on most any website, not just to WordPress. Buttons can be personalized to show users the services that they use most often, and integration with over 300 services — Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, many more — is available. AddThis also includes Pinterest as a sharing option.




4. Sharexy
























Sharexy provides button customization and placement options.































Sharexy gives users the capability to customize not only the look of sharing buttons, but placement either at the top or bottom of the post, as well. Users can choose from over 20 social networks to share with, and sharing via email is also included.













Like ShareThis and AddThis, Sharexy can be used on any type of site. A WordPress plugin is also available.













Sharexy offers both static or floating sharing widgets that can be positioned on the left or right hand side of the page, or at the top and bottom, depending on the user’s preference.


5. Digg Digg



Digg Digg is a WordPress plugin created by Buffer.



Digg Digg is a WordPress plugin created by Buffer. Users can display all the popular social sharing buttons such as Twitter, Buffer, Facebook (both Share and Like), LinkedIn, Google +1, Reddit, Pinterest and many others.





Customization choices include a floating bar that resides on either the left or right hand side of the page, or at the top or bottom of the blog post. Support for email and print are also included.




6. GetSocial




GetSocial is a WordPress plugin.




Another WordPress plugin, GetSocial gives bloggers the capability to add a floating social media-sharing box to blog posts.













It includes Twitter, Facebook Like and Share buttons, Buffer, Google+, Pinterest, LinkedIn, StumbleUpon, and Digg. A unique feature allows users to add their own custom buttons.













Buttons can be re-arranged in the order preferred by using simple drag-and-drop functionality. If desired, buttons can also show the number of share counts. Both static and floating versions are available.




7. Slick Social
























Slick Social enables users to see sharing statistics via an admin panel.































Slick Social, which is also a WordPress plugin, not only offers the same features and sharing capabilities as others on this list, but users can see summaries of sharing metrics via an administrative panel.













Buttons include Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, StumbleUpon, Digg, Buffer, Pinterest, and others. Users can also choose to select URL shortening for Twitter from several services: Bit.ly, Digg, Su.pr, and TinyURL.




8. Shareaholic
























Shareaholic offers three different button styles.































Shareaholic offers three different button styles: Classic, Sexy, and Sassy. The latter two are designed specifically with mobile devices in mind and, to add an element of interactivity, the “Sexy” version buttons animate when a reader mouses over them.













The buttons can be used on any website, and a WordPress plugin is available. Over 100 sites are supported, including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, StumbleUpon, and Pinterest.






















9. Sharebar








































Sharebar automatically reorients from vertical to horizontal positions.































WordPress plugin Sharebar adds a fully customizable vertical box to the left of a blog post that contains buttons to popular social networking sites. If the page is resized below 1,000 pixels, the vertical bar disappears and a horizontal sharing bar appears under the post title.













Larger buttons are used in the vertical bar, while the small buttons are used in the horizontal version.




10. Social Media Widget








































Social Media Widget includes support for RSS and email.































Social Media Widget allows users to input their social media website profile URLs and other subscription options to show an icon on the sidebar.













It supports many of the same social media sites as others on this list, but also includes support for Orkut, Friendfeed, Flickr, Picasa, Pandora, iTunes, and many others. RSS subscription and email sharing are included, as well.




Social Sharing Best Practices













Sharing works best when the buttons are located in a way they can be easily spotted by site visitors. Here are a few social sharing dos and don’ts.













Do




Choose a prominent position (top of the page is best).




Place sharing near the content being shared.













Don’t




Do not put sharing in the site navigation.




Avoid putting sharing only in the post footer or below the fold.




The sidebar is not optimal for sharing.




Conclusion













Try several of these to find the one that’s right for you. Regardless of which you choose, do not ignore social sharing. It is one more way to increase site traffic, reach, and exposure within social networks.













Social media has reinvented the marketing landscape, and the way we promote ourselves, and our content to billions of active web users. Facebook and Twitter are the two leading social media networks for those who are eager to consume new and trending content on daily basis, and ensuring that our readers are able to connect with us through these networks is a crucial aspects of online success, whether for personal or business reasons. Social media allows us to connect with like-minded groups of people, and consume content that resonates with our own personalities, interests, and aspirations in our life.













We are no longer using social media just to connect with others as well, as predicted by Observer — the social media landscape is changing into a full web powerhouse that we will be able to use for concluding online shopping, for doing more intimate customer service tasks (which are already in full swing in so many ways), and tools like Live interaction between you and your followers. Social media strategies are also constantly changing, so it’s imperative that we don’t just work on our social media posts, but also on our external content on mediums like blogs, and business websites. The changes to expect in coming years are of variety of natures.













Above all else, social media is the number one way of building a following without making any monetary investment, and for us to ensure that our readers are able to help us promote our work, we should make sure that we are providing our readers with the options to promote our work without the need to think twice about it. The best way to do that is through specifically built social media sharing widgets and tools that allow our content to be put on spotlight, without the need to seem pushy or demanding. The best websites in the world rely on such widgets to reach a new audience with the help of existing one, and today we will cover the best social media sharing widgets that take only few minutes to setup, but provide extensive variations of modern web features for maximum exposure and growth hacking.




AddToAny































AddToAny is one of the pioneers of social sharing widgets. The company has been around for a decade now, providing accessible integrations of social widgets for standalone static website, for WordPress, Joomla! and Drupal (amongst many many other content management platforms) users, and is packed with what we would call the modern state of the art feature set. Millions of WordPress users rely on AddToAny for their social sharing needs, whilst dozens of other millions of webmasters use AddToAny on their personal websites. The growth of the feature list of AddToAny is what has kept so many coming back, realizing that it’s not about the design (which is great as we know it), but the actual functionality that such a plugin can offer.













AddToAny supports hundreds of bookmarking services, making it easy for you and your visitors to share your content with one click within the same page they are reading the content from. The widget supports mobile devices, uses SVG for modern visual content delivery, and is fully optimized for ensuring websites load and act fast with the sharing widget active on pages. Those who wish to track social metrics can easily integrate the widget in their Google Analytics dashboard for extra reporting.Download




AddThis































AddThis is another famous social sharing platform that provides a multitude of options when it comes to marketing your own content using a simple standalone widget. AddThis provides the traditional sharing buttons that can be customized to appear anywhere on the page, there’s a new feature for displaying Social Follow buttons; also anywhere you like. The two other big features are more sophisticated and focus more on the content aspects of the online world. The first one is targeted popups based on your own specifications; now you can easily display tailored content to readers who visit particular pages or sections of the site. And the other one is content recommendation where you can display a widget at the bottom of the page, recommending your readers other interesting and relevant content pages on your site — everything happens through the efforts of AddThis, meaning that all scripts and widgets are fully secure, and also accurate thanks to the latest web technology.













The platform has grown from a tiny company to a full-on enterprise solution for websites small and large. If you are looking to learn more about your audience and its habits, especially in the world of social media, then there are no better platforms out there than AddThis — which offers a complex data analysis platform to teach you everything there is to know about the audience that you are serving.Download




AddInto































AddInto is not an entirely forgotten service, and does remain within significant reach on websites old and new. The “Share Box” comes in different styles and different ways to present itself, allowing you to display social sharing buttons in different ways for different design situations. The smaller buttons will work great with positioning nearby header and footer content areas, while the bigger buttons will work great in pretty much any situation. Developers can find themselves at the API section of the site to learn more about how to integrate AddInto into your own projects and applications as you go. Widgets for Firefox and Google Chrome are readily available.Download




SumoMe































SumoMe is still considered the new kid on the block when it comes to social sharing and social trends, but this company has managed to skyrocket in popularity in just a few short years. SumoMe’s main areas of functionality are social promotion, list building for email, and content analysis through techniques like heatmaps. SumoMe delivers an outstanding list of features that are built for helping webmasters to promote their content without the extra effort required. Load up SumoMe and begin to install custom tools like Discover for promoting yourself on blogs that other Discover users are promoting. Content Analytics app lets you truly understand how, when and where your users are reading content and how they are reacting to that content. Scroll Box is for collecting email subscribers as the user goes deeper down each content page, but if you really want to collect signups, then go for the Welcome Mat — a full-page welcome widget that promotes your email list as soon as someone enters the website.













But, we are not really here to discuss all those amazing features, we are here to learn more about the social sharing aspect that SumoMe has to offer. The platform provides a highly customizable, and highly appealing, social sharing widget that can be used as a floating sharing bar on the side of the pages, or integrated within the actual content pages as a standalone widget. It works for the majority of leading social media sites, it works great on desktop and mobile devices with concise customization options, and the premium version will give you deeper inisght into the social sharing habits of your website visitors.




Sharexy































Sharexy is a growing in popularity social sharing platform offering flexible and elegant sharing buttons in form of a customizable widget. Create your own social buttons, or select some of the most popular styles for sharing buttons from the Gallery section of the site. We took a quick peek at the available designs, and they all look stunning, and we know they will function great with majority of modern designs out there.Download




Hootsuite































Hootsuite has their own little social sharing tool available. As we all know already, Hootsuite is the provider of a sophisticated social management platform that relies on great features to sustain its user base, and to this day it has worked wonders for the company. Their sharing widget is for letting developers create tiny sharing widgets with different types of icons. The features of this widget include the ability for visitors to share your content across multiple social media websites simultaneously, the functionality to help you schedule your content for optimal publishing times, rather than pushing it out whenever and however. URLs you, or anyone else, share will automatically be processed through a reliable URL shortener for maximum efficiency, enterprise customers can enjoy in-depth analytics of the social activity done through the Hootsuite Button, and there’s support for a variety of file types that visitors can share when they click the share button.Download




Buffer































Buffer (also known as Buffer App) is another tremendously successful social media sharing widget / application that is helping millions of web users around the world to share content more effectively, in a more convenient way where the focus remains on the content, rather than the sharing experience — which in this case is anyway a very appealing and professional experience. In simplest of terms, Buffer provides its users with a social sharing widget that can be used to quickly and easily share and schedule content across a multitude of social networks all at the same time. It’s the perfect solution for webmasters, content consumers, journalists, and even designers and creatives who are actively engaged on social media.













Buffer provides users will analytics reports on the best time to tweet, the most engaging users and tweets, and so much more data that will forever change the way you perceive social media publishing and promotion. All of the social sharing widgets in our list here are in one way or the other already featuring the Buffer sharing button, but you can also get it for your mobile phone, or Mozilla and Chrome browsers too.Download




ShareThis































ShareThis has been around for quite some time now, and the company has definitely taken some new and modern approaches to social sharing, apart from the usage of music on their homepage, the ShareThis platform is a pretty appealing one to anyone who is interested in floating social sharing bars (but also standalone ones), but also social analytics to learn more about your audience habits and patterns. The new look is modern, sleek and clean and will work well with a large set of designs. The widget supports more than 100+ social bookmarking and sharing platforms for your users to send content to.Download




AddShoppers































Even though AddShoppers is advertising itself as a social marketing and application marketing tool for deep analytics, AddShoppers does provide a social sharing widget that’s available for a plethora of platforms — WordPress, Magento, Shopify, BigCommerce and others to name a few. The social widget enables features like social login, modern social sharing, and of course native analytics integration from the AddShoppers platform itself.Download




Shareaholic































Shareaholic for a long time was a platform that not so many people knew about, mostly niche websites scattered in all directions of the planet, whereas today the Shareaholic plugin is used by millions of webmasters, developers, and designers all around the globe — all enjoying the immense benefits of using a modern sharing widget that delivers on its promise; higher user engagement, more social shares, and ultimately more website traffic. Powered by its proprietary window into user interests, Shareaholic enables advertisers and publishers to personalize how relevant content is discovered, consumed, engaged with, and shared. Specific to marketers, Shareaholic increases native ad performance by harnessing the power of the web’s highly engaged enthusiasts, influencers and evangelists. For site owners, Shareaholic builds products that help them effectively engage and grow their online audiences, monetize their traffic, and analyze how their content is being shared across the web. Available for Chrome, WordPress, and other major software platforms out there.Download




LoginRadius































The focus of LoginRadius is in three different directions — it’s about social sharing, it’s about social login integration, and it’s about social data collection for further improvements of previous two features. LoginRadius makes it easy for webmasters to integrate Social Login features in their websites // apps (through an API), but also in their WordPress blogs through the use of an official plugin. LoginRadius is also one of those projects that needed time for growth and polishing before becoming truly ready for the real world. This plugin also works great with the leading plugins for WordPress, such as BuddyPress, bbPress and a number of membership site plugins.Download




Social Marker































Social Marker is a very flexible social sharing widget that will help you share one single piece of content to multiple sources all at the same time. Everyone knows how time consuming it can be to share one single link to twenty different networks (all of which you are a part of), so the people behind Social Marker built a tool that will make the process of multiple sharing much more painless, much more effective.