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How To Add Share Buttons To WordPress Posts
WordPress is no doubt the best publishing platform for many bloggers and businesses alike. The ease of use and scalability are hard to find in other leading platforms and this makes WordPress very attractive. But if you’d like to take your WordPress blog to the next level, you need to add social share buttons to your posts and allow visitors on your blog to share your content with the rest of the world.
How It Works
Simply put, share buttons appear on every post, either at the top, side or bottom. When a user reads one of your articles, they can choose to share that particular article with their friends on social media by clicking on the respective social network button which would, in turn, take them to the social media page. There, they can share the link of the post which is automatically pasted on the publish window on the social network page. When their friends click on this link, it takes them back to your website and specifically to the post that was shared.
The Social Pug Plugin
While there are many social share button plugins on the WordPress plugin repository, Social Pug plugin is one of the best plugins around, with over 80,000 active installations on WordPress websites across the world. Let’s look at how to use this plugin to add share buttons to your WordPress website.
Installation
Just like any WordPress plugin, you install the Social Pug plugin by heading over to your WordPress dashboard then Plugins -> Add New. On the search input field on the top right, enter the keyword Social Pug and hit enter. Find the appropriate search result and click install then activate. Once activated, go to the plugin settings area which you’ll find at the bottom left of the dashboard menu tab.
Settings
There are a few settings that you need to configure to start using the plugin. Here are the most important to get you started:
First, choose to enable either floating sidebar or inline content buttons or both. The floating sidebar will appear on the left/right margin of the screen while he inline content option displays the buttons within the blog post.
Next, if you chose Floating Sidebar, click on the settings icon. On the next page, select which social networks to display on your posts. Scrolling down this page, you’ll see more display options that you can use to further customize.
If you chose Inline Content, click on the settings icon in that box. On the next page, select which social networks to display on your posts. Scrolling down this page, you’ll see more display options that you can use to further customize the inline content share buttons.
Save your settings. You can now go to a blog post to see how the buttons are displaying. That’s it!
Social Pug Pro Version
By purchasing the pro version, you unlock several features that add more value to your social sharing efforts. Here are the top features:
- Popup share buttons will allow you to catch the attention of visitors and encourage them to share your articles,
- Link shortening, which is important on platforms with word limits and also makes the share post cleaner and easier to read,
- Click to tweet feature makes it easier for users to tweet specific phrases from your article.
Conclusion
Adding share buttons on your blog will help improve engagement on your website and beyond. Implement the Social Pug plugin as I’ve shown you and you’ll be well on your way there.
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