Five new social media plugins for WordPress

Posted April 19th, 2012 / By Francis in Social

More individuals and businesses are incorporating social networking into their blogging efforts. With Wordpress being one of the most flexible applications around, it is an ideal fit for this type of integration. Here are five of the latest plugins you can use to combine your blogging and social media initiatives.

1. ShareBar

ShareBar is one of the hottest new social media plugins available for the Wordpress platform. What this tool does is provide an easy way to include links and buttons from your favorite social networks on your blog. These links and buttons can be customized to appear in either a vertical bar that is displayed to the left of your posts, or a horizontal bar that is displayed underneath the title of the post. If you have a strong social presence and want your readers to connect, ShareBar can be a big help.

2. Socialize

The socialize plugin gives you two options for adding social sharing buttons to your Wordpress blog. You can either add them inline via CSS, or the call-to-action box located beneath your posts. Socialize supports all the top social networking and bookmarking sites, and the ability to use CSS gives you virtually endless customization possibilities. While there is currently no type of analytics feature available, you can see how many times your post has been shared across the social web.

3. Tweet2Download

If Twitter is your thing, then you definitely want to add this Wordpress plugin to your collection. Tweet2Download allows you to give away free blog content in exchange for a tweet or follow on trendy social networking site Twitter. It is becoming an increasingly popular option for Wordpress blogs that offer content such as music, video, articles, and other highly sought after material. All in all, Tweet2Download is a great tool for serious Twitter marketers.

4. WP Social Toolbar

Many of the newer Wordpress plugins for social media make it easy for readers to share your content. WP Social Toolbar follows the trend, but does so much more. This plugin gives readers the ability to like your Facebook page and share your content on Twitter, while allowing you to showcase your most recent tweets and links to all your social networks. Best of all, WP Social Toolbar is customizable, so you can select from a broad range colors and fonts as well as decide whether the toolbar appears on the homepage of your blog or only certain pages.

5. SocialMetrics

SocialMetrics is another good Wordpress plugin designed to help bloggers take advantage of social media integration. Hence the name, it lets you view how the posts and pages of your blog are performing across the social web. Compatible with Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, Digg, and a host of other platforms, this tool is capable of providing valuable insights that can be used to fine-tune your strategy for the best results.

New Wordpress plugins are being released all the time. On the social media front, these new plugins are driving the integration efforts of bloggers throughout the web.

Image by Samuel M. Livingston

Francis Santos is a best practices activist and an advocate for free email marketing and html email. Francis can also be contacted via Twitter.