We are starting another series of posts today on the various plugins that are our personal favorites on our WordPress blog. Jason & I get asked often what are the best social media plugins for social media, so we thought this series might be helpful to many of you. The first plugin that is going to be discussed today is probably the one we get ask about the most often.
People are constantly using our chat with us function in our side bar to ask, “What is that social media plugin at the bottom of your posts? The one with all the little icons for various social media platforms.” The name of that plugin is SexyBookmarks by Shareaholic. The reason I really like this social media plugin is that it adds the slightest bit of animation to the bottom of each post. When you hover over any of the icons at the bottom of a post, they slide up and down making them stand out. Also, it has a great amount of customization.
With offering close to 90 different sharing services, you can enable just about any possible network sharing you wish. There are many that I have never even heard of! You can select all, the most popular, or customize to which services you want to show up to your audience. Some of my favorites other than your standard social networking sites include: Posterous, RSS, Google Reader, Gmail, FriendFeed, & Ping.fm.
Social Media Plugin- The technical side of installation SexyBookmarks
Like most of your plugins for WordPress, you can add this one onto your posts automatically by visiting the plugin library at WordPress and searching for SexyBookmarks. Or, if you prefer to install things via FTP, you can download SexyBookmarks here.
Once you install SexyBookmarks & activate the plugin, you will then need to visit your settings section of your dashboard and customize the plugin. This is where you choose which pages or posts you want SexyBookmarks to show up on, which services you want to activate, the title you want displayed, whether you want the links to be no followed, and if you want a specific URL shortener used for tracking.
In some instances you might be require to fix the “spritgen.” To do this, simply login to your site via FTP, locate the file within your plugin folder and then find the spritegen file. Right click on it and select to change permissions. Set them to 777 and save. Once you do this, your file will now be activated & ready to be used.
SexyBookmarks needs to fix:
The one thing that really annoys me when I am setting up this plugin for a client is that the most popular list is really not the most popular sites for here in the USA. The one that really blows my mind is that Facebook, the social media 800 LB gorilla is not chosen when you click most popular. I wish that they could at least add Facebook and a few others onto that list.
Summary of Social Media Plugin SexyBookmarks
There really isn’t anything else with the social media plugin that I would want to change. I think it is a great plugin that is powerful, looks great, and performs wonderfully. Now that I have shared with you how it works and what it does, feel free to go to the bottom of this post and test it out! Use any of the buttons below to share this post on your favorite social media platform. Of course, once you do, make sure you leave a comment telling us which one you used!
Hi Jeremy, thanks so much for the review!
Facebook not being in “popular services” should be fixed in the next release.
Jay- Thanks for stopping by! You my friend have become our social media winner for the week! We will be writing about it in the upcoming days. Also, glad to hear that Shareaholic will be adding FB into the most popular!