Ask the Experts

How Do I add Sharing Buttons To My Site

I want to make it easier for my visitors to share content from my website on social networks like Twitter and Facebook, how do I do that?

There's an App for that

Great question, and it’s actually a pretty simple, painless process. The easiest way is to find a third-party solution which integrates the buttons on your site. For our site, we’ve installed buttons from Shareaholic, which has an easy-to-use back end that allows you to change the size of the buttons, where they are placed, and what they say.

Depending upon how your site is built will really determine what your best options are. If you have an open-source CMS such as WordPress or Drupal there are plenty of modules which will plug-in to your site quite nicely. You’ll more than likely need a developer to give you a hand, but it shouldn’t take them too long to install the module and test it.

Here are some options to take a look at which integrate well with WordPress:

  • Share-this – I like what share-this has to say with their site, however they seem to have a lot of negative reviews on wordpress.org
  •  Simple Share Buttons on the other hand seems to have a lot of positive reviews, though it doesn’t have analytics for shares/likes.
  •  Social Sharing Toolkit has a lot of negative reviews recently. It looks like they added some new malware on the app which slows down sites, so be careful with this option
  •  Shareaholic –  Support was very helpful via twitter and they have a pretty clean looking interface (This is the one that we use at Accella

Whichever option you choose, don’t forget to create content that people want to share, that’s most important. Though giving them a tool that helps them share it effortlessly is definitely a big help.

Go ahead and try Shareaholic out – use the buttons at the top of this page to share it on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, or one of the other many options you can choose from.

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