Social bookmarking has continued to rise in popularity because it is an excellent way to leverage the power of website visitors, and their ability to share your content with others.
This not only increases website traffic via referral, but also because it is an effective means of building backlinks to your site.
WordPress has a number of excellent social sharing plugins that are compatible with WP 2.9.2.
Top 9 Social Sharing Plugins Compatible with WP 2.9.2
1. Sexy Bookmarks
Sexy Bookmarks has been around for a while and has proved to be an effective way to get your readers to actually submit your articles to various social networking websites. Sexy Bookmarks has become popular because it allows for readers to see larger icons, which increases the likelihood of them taking action. The goal of sexy bookmarks is to add a little extra flair, with larger icons, to entice your readers to take action. Sexy Bookmarks is continually being modified based upon user requests to ensure that it provides access to all of the sites that you want your readers to use.
2. Social Bookmarking RELOADED
Social Bookmarking RELOADED adds a list of XHTML compliant graphic links to end of the pages and posts on your WordPress website. Additionally, making modifications can easily be done from the WordPress admin section. Social Bookmarking RELOADED supports not only the commonly found social sharing sites, but also sites rarely seen on many of the other social sharing plugins, like: Squidoo, Feed Me Links!, and Forexassessment.
3. AddToAny: Share/Bookmark/Email Button
AddToAny is by far one of the most comprehensive sharing plugins available. It currently allows you to make more than 125 different sharing sites available to your readers. While many people will not use all 125+ sites that are available, it gives you the freedom and flexibility to utilize the ones that help your website out the most. Additionally, there are additional tabs so that your readers can either email the post to their friends or even bookmark the post so that they can come back whenever they want.
4. Bookmarkify
Bookmarkify is a social media marketing plugin that currently includes more than 50 social bookmarking sites. It also includes a “HTML Copy” option that makes adding a link to your posts easy for other publishers. It can even be used in the sidebar with only minor template changes.
5. Digg Digg
Digg Digg has become a popular option because it will actually track and display how many times your post has been shared via the specific social bookmarking sites available. Currently, it only supports 15 social bookmarking sites, but the lack of options is made up for by the unique count display system. The count display system not only lets you know how popular each post is, but also lets your readers know as well.
6. Share and Follow
Share and Follow was designed so that average readers can use it with ease. It is also great for webmasters who are only concerned with the most popular social networking sties. It is very flexible and can be used as a widget, shortcode, template tag, and auto added.
7. Facebook I Like Button
The Facebook I Like Button was designed specifically to allow your readers to make connections to your posts and share the content on Facebook with a single click. It can be implemented with either iframe or XFBML, however for stability reasons iframe is the default setting. Additionally, this plugin has been designed to be highly customizable so that it looks great on every blog.
8. Publish 2 Ping.fm
Publish 2 Ping.fm makes it easy for your posts to be automatically published to the Ping.fm service. You an select the category, the publishing template, and even whether or not you want to post updates. It will even shorten every URL with the bit.ly shortening service.
9. Socialize This
Socialize This makes it easy to create social widget icons for your pages and posts. Very little configuration is needed in order to seamlessly integrate it with your WordPress site. It will also automatically tell your Twitter followers whenever you have a new post, and it automatically shortens URL’s and supports 13 social websites.
Social sharing and bookmarking seems to be a tool that is here to stay. Fortunately, all 9 of these plugins make it simple and are fully compatible with WP 2.9.2. They all have their unique features, so it should be easy to find the perfect plugin for your blog.
Tell me if there are other nice plugins out there!
Dennis February 8, 2012 at 10:02 am
Hey that sexy bookmarks is dead. I think they changed the name of it for whatever reason.. I loved that plugin..
I like Digg Digg though.. It has a nice scrolling sharebar and it puts sharing buttons at the top or bottom of posts…
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Brian W April 19, 2011 at 11:31 am
We just launched a Wordpress plugin that adds social media icons, and enables you to automatically be able to track the clicks in your Google Analytics. The (free) plugin info is at: http://www.ecreativeim.com/trackable-social-share-icons
We had two problems with many of the existing plugins: many of them slow your site load speed, so we made ours to live entirely on your server, and run no javascript at all.
The second is that many of these plugins — like ShareThis and AddToAny and others — actually send all kinds of information about your users to a 3rd party marketing agency, including what they’re clicking, their IP address, how they got to that page, etc. Ours does not share information with anyone but you and your Google Analytics (and even that can be turned off).
We just released it, and we’re eager to get feedback about anything people think should be improved!
Abhishek August 30, 2010 at 12:33 pm
This is awesome wordpress plugin using many of them listed above and will try with other one also.
Thanks For Sharing This Lovely Plugins
-Abhishek
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Tinh June 22, 2010 at 12:58 am
Like @Dennis said, we should check whether these plugins are compatible with WP 3.0 which has just been released. Digg digg is my favorite one now
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RNasty June 22, 2010 at 4:23 am
Compatible with 3.0 on June 22:
SexyBookmarks
AddToAny
Digg Digg
Socialize This
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Jason June 20, 2010 at 11:59 pm
This is exactly what I’m looking for (I’m new to wp). I have just shifted recently to wp from joomla due to some stlying issues. I’m currently using Digg Digg plugin, but I’m not really satisfied with it’s icons. Just want to ask RNasty, if you happen to know what social sharing plugin is used by “famousbloggers.net”, yeah that one placed after the content
or was that specifically customized for this blog only?
Regards,
Jason Acidre
Tek3D June 20, 2010 at 9:42 am
I have used Digg Digg and Sexy Bookmark but I am not totally satisfied with them. Maybe using images manually is the easiest way to configure your social sharing. Btw, Hesham’s story is funny, lol
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Dennis Edell June 19, 2010 at 2:46 pm
has anyone checked them against 3.0 yet?
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lawmacs June 19, 2010 at 10:15 am
My favourite all time plugin is Digg Digg this covers all for me
Harsh Agrawal June 19, 2010 at 8:27 am
I love this Sexy bookmarks plugin the most because it is attractive and call for more actions. Though to reduce the load of my Wordpress blog, I started using custom codes now.. Which makes it more faster.. Anyways nice and useful post.
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Ileane June 19, 2010 at 5:39 am
Hi RNasty, I think that some of these plugins are better than others and some bloggers overdo it when it comes to this. If you have a retweet button (Tweetmeme or Topsy) then you don’t need to include the Twitter icon in the Sexy Bookmarks set up. I think it makes people confused. Also many bloggers don’t have the settings installed properly, so that when you retweet them the user name never appears.
Hesham,
Your story is hilarious and I don’t blame your wife for getting to the bottom of your “sexy” internet activity
When I did a guest post on Blazing Minds about this plugin I was concerned that using that word would bring the wrong traffic to Karen’s blog so I just called it the “BookMarks” plugin – everyone knew what I was talking about. HA!
Thanks for this post guys.
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Brian June 19, 2010 at 1:54 am
Great article and thanks for the info! I have been debating on switching from Digg Digg to Sexy Bookmarks, but knowing where and how many times each post is being shared just seems like too valuable of a resource.
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Colleen June 18, 2010 at 11:20 pm
Needless to say, we are now in 3.0 land, but having said that, we just installed Sexy Bookmarks and really like it. Easy to install and configure, and more importantly, we’ve received some traffic from it.
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Asad June 18, 2010 at 10:40 am
I am using sexy bookmarks plugin in my tech blog and i really loved it because of the ease it gives to the users.
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Kimi June 18, 2010 at 9:31 am
Great list there, but i am trying to reduce using plugins, because i noticed when i checked my blog’s URL in w3c, most error codes were caused by plugins. Especially social bookmarks
So after that, my error codes in W3C was valid (only homepage) lol
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RNasty June 18, 2010 at 9:40 am
I wouldn’t put too much emphasis on 100% valid code by w3c standards. I don’t remember when is the last time I saw HTML valid site. If you have HTML Validator for FireFox installed and visit Google homepage you’ll see they have 128 errors and 38 warnings. Similar is with every site you visit. So don’t worry. Valid code is not worth all those nice features that plugins offer you.
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Kimi^^ June 18, 2010 at 9:49 am
Yeah, i just validate my landing page (which home page) as in inner pages, i have plenty errors too lol..from embedding videos code
At the moment i just put some codes to bookmark my post without using plugins. It is not that fancy but i am successfully reducing plugins usages.
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Nasrul Hanis June 18, 2010 at 8:42 am
Sexy Bookmarks is the best! Easy and compatible. Love to see these plugins and I might think back about using them again
Nabeel from Create Your First Website June 18, 2010 at 4:52 am
No one can undermine the importance of social bookmarking.
It is very important to have them. I still see some blogs which do not have them. You need to make it as easy as possible for visitors to share something. If you do not make it as easy as possible, then there is a high chance that they wont bother to do it.
RNasty June 18, 2010 at 3:22 am
I’m also fan of sexy bookmarks. They are simply the most attractive one. That’s why they are first on the list. I’m planning to change from AddToAny to Sexy Bookmarks (Drupal version) on WebmasterFormat for a some time, but sometimes it is hard to find time for such small modifications. I wish day lasts more than 24 hours.
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James Pruitt June 17, 2010 at 8:23 pm
I was using the Sociable plug-in for mine. however I have heard a lot of great things about sexy bookmarks. Guess I need to check it out.
My girlfriend isn’t the jealous type so i should be ok there.
thanks for the great post.
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John Soares June 17, 2010 at 5:12 pm
Hmmm, perhaps I should switch to Sexy Bookmarks. I’ve been using Social Bookmarks, but it didn’t even make the list.
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AJ June 17, 2010 at 3:28 pm
I am a huge fan of adding in your own social icons manually. With the Big-G cracking down on site speed and me being super picky about excess code, I rather KISS it.
When I first new nothing about web development these plugins were fantastic and I was definitely a sexy bookmarks fan.
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bbrian017 June 17, 2010 at 2:14 pm
By far sexy bookmarks is my favorite pluggin. The guy behind it all is a great guy and anyone needing social icons should support him. It’s nice to look at, easy to install and is full of customizable options.
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Hesham June 17, 2010 at 2:27 pm
Hey Brian, he sexy bookmarks was the first plugin I have used when I first start blogging, and I am still using it on My Life Thinking blog!
It’s actually super sexy! but something happen with me while I am on WP dashboard and my wife came and she was sow the plugin name and start to gale on me because she read “Sexy”.. so she asked me WHAT IS THIS?! she thought by mistake that was an email from someone or something like that and she felt jealous lol!
Since that time I stopped using it, I prefer to add social media button by simply images and be in the safe side lol!
I know you are preparing to get marry soon, so be careful with that plugin
bbrian017 June 17, 2010 at 2:46 pm
Oh my I’m laughing so hard right now because your story is so funny. I also prefer to have my social icons as images like you. I have done a mini version of this on the blog engage social blog. I have added maybe 5 images. It works fine but I still use sexy bookmarks too.
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P.K.ARUN June 18, 2010 at 3:57 pm
It’s really funny incident
and it would be better if you provided a screenshot of each of those plugin here.
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Hesham June 18, 2010 at 4:00 pm
Screen shots are good for real, but it’s kind of hard to do it now because we will have then to setup every plugin to take the shot!
Thanks for your comment!