WordPress: Top 5 Social Sharing Plugins for Your WP Website in 2012.

I strongly believe that WordPress is the best thing since sliced bread. I love the openness of it, I love the size of the community, I love the help you will find from WordPress users – everywhere! And, of course, I love WordPress plugins.

WordPress plugins will let you create the website you want to have. All you need is an idea of what you want to achieve, some time and curiosity. You need to play. You need to install different plugins, try them out, test how they work, see if they work for you.

One of the most important things for websites and blogs today is the ability of sharing it’s content on social networks. Social networks are a great way of sharing your content with people and potentially finding new readers. Sure, your readers could copy and paste a link but let’s face it – people are lazy! You need to use social plugins. Here is a list of Top 5 by my personal opinion, in no particular order.

Socialize

Socialize is one of more popular plugins for social sharing WordPress content. Unfortunately, at the time of writing this post the website was down. It lets you rearrange icons, use Facebook Open Graph and Bitly. You can, of course, change the way the buttons are displayed, as well as their position on the page.

Get Social

Get Social will add a floating sidebar to your website. Personally, I am not a fan of those, but if you like that, you will like this plugin. The sidebar can, of course, be customized. The maker of Get Social made also Social Metrics plugin, which I happen to like a lot. It will work with any social plugin you choose, so you can give it a try.

AddThis

AddThis is my personal favourite when it comes to  social plugins, but it does not have to be yours. It lets you choose what kind of icons you want to add before or after your post. I like this kind, but you can have smaller icons, or bigger display of how many times your content was shared.

It has integration with Google Analytics and if you register on their website, you can see the status of your shared content. I like being able to see it in my WordPress Dashboard.

ShareThis: Share Buttons and Sharing Analytics

Another powerful plugin is ShareThis. It will give you more options on the look of your icons and ways to share. ShareThis also allows an option of registering for the service, which will give you insights into what kind of content was shared from your website, and where.

You can activate a hovering sidebar with sharing options (not displayed) and ShareNow (displayed on the picture on the left). It is the first-to-market social tool that allows any publisher to leverage frictionless sharing without having to invest in and create their own custom solution.

Shareaholic* | email, bookmark, share buttons

Do you remember Sexy Bookmarks? That plugin today is now called Shareaholic and Sexy Bookmarks is just one part of it. You can choose between Classic Bookmarks, Sexy Bookmarks or a Top Hat. The plugin also offers Recommendations and Analysis.

So, what are you waiting for? Go try these out and find out your favourite! 🙂

P.S. The post I was using for testing these plugins is here: Songza – free web radio with playlists for every occasion, in case you got interested.