Make Social Media Sharing Easy-Peasy

Wouldn’t it be great if, after you’ve worked so hard to generate original content, all the visitors to your website made a point to share your post with their network?!

Talk about getting lots of exposure, fast!

While there’s no way that I know of to have every visitor share your post with their friends, you can make it as easy as possible  to share your content, so that the maximum number of people will.

To do this, we’re going to add some social bookmarking icons at the bottom of the post. There are quite a few Wordpress plugins that do this (Social Bookmarks, ShareThis, AddtoAny, etc.), but my personal favorite is Sexy Bookmarks. Which one you pick may be based on nothing more than how well it matches the rest of your site!

Whichever one you choose, make sure you go through the settings, and if you have the option, deselect some of the bookmarking sites. There are really only a handful that are used by the majority of readers, so avoid cluttering up the bottom of your post with tons of bookmarking icons you can’t identify. Just the basics will do here!

Lastly, depending on your market and the type of readers you attract (or want to attract!), you may want to add “Print” or “Email to a friend” icons at the bottom of each post. This makes it easy for those who are not as active online and in social media to share or save the post in a format that is easiest for them.

The Sexy Bookmarks plugin does have email & print functionality, and Add to Any has an email option, but if you choose to use one of the other options, you might need to add additional plugins to have email & print functionality – a few are WP-Print or HP Blog Printing, or WP-Email.

Wrapping up: while it can be tempting to add all the cool-looking gadgets to your site, think about how the people you really want to be reading your blog will actually use it, and do your best to cater to them. This increases the likelihood that they’ll share with the method they’re most comfortable with, and your great content will get spread far and wide!