You’ve Created Your Content – Now Be Social with It!

Previously on Online Friendly, we told you about some ways to update your website frequently. These days, visitors to your website can do more than just look at your pages.

Social Networks like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter are a powerful another way to have your website content put right where many people spend at least some of their day.

Not only can you share your website content on the profiles you have on these social networks, but your visitors can also share your content with their network of people.

In this blog post, we will show you how to make things easier for your visitors to share your site with their network of friends and business colleagues.

1. Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn Buttons

   Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook have a share button that you can put on your site. These buttons are lines of code that you can copy and paste into your site template.Each time your visitors click on them, they will be able to share that part of your site with the people they know.

   The LinkedIn widget is embedded as part of a link instead of looking like a button. With all three, once a visitor clicks on the link or button, they will see a window with a link back to your site, some descriptive text, and a place they can add their own comments.

   Here you can find the official buttons from the three of the major social networks:

   – Twitter: http://twitter.com/goodies/tweetbutton
   – Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/share/
   – LinkedIn: http://developer.linkedin.com/docs/DOC-1075

   For example, the blog we built for Toronto Wedding Invitation and Graphic Design company Laura K Design has two buttons: a Twitter share button and a Facebook ‘Like’ button. The ‘Like’ button from Facebook let those visitors who click it to both put the blog post on their Facebook ‘wall’ and permanently under their profile Likes – both visible to all their friends.

   For more popular Sharing Buttons, see SharingButtons.org

2. Sharing Services

   Instead of adding individual buttons for various social networks, you can have as ingle button which includes today’s most popular social networks.

   Not only that; most of these social media button sallow a visitor to share your content via other avenues such as email or phone text message.  Some services also have statistics to give you an idea how many people are sharing your content and how.

   Two of the most popular sharing button services are:

   – Add This
   – Share This

   With both of these services, you can create and customize your button with the social networks and sharing services where you want your blog posts to be published on.

   You can also choose the button based on the kind of website you have and platform used, for example, WordPressor Blogger.

3. Social Widgets for WordPress

   Finally, if you have a WordPress blog (our favourite blogging platform), these two plugins will setup a sharing button quickly and easily. They can be installed and customized from the WordPress admin panel. Some of them allow users to publish simultaneously the content on all social networks in just one click.

   – Share This
   – Add To Any
   – Only Wire for WordPress

   There are plenty of share button widgets for WordPress. Here is a list with some of them: http://pelfusion.com/tools/top-35-plugins-of-wordpress-to-share-your-blog-post/

   Remember, these days many of your visitors are social and will be willing to spread your content around the internet, attracting new visitors to your online identity – if you make it easy for them!

   Feel free to contact us at our Toronto office if you would like to know more about how to go social with your web site.