Social Bookmarking WordPress Plugins
Social bookmarking has been considerably growing in importance in the latest years as an effective tool to feature interesting news and pages that visitors find on your site. Luckily, WordPress offers a variety of plugins which allow you to automatically display all sorts of social bookmarking links and help promote your website with nearly no effort.
Sociable
Sociable admin interface
Sociable is a great plugin, compatible with WordPress installations 2.2 to 2.5.1 in its current version, that allows you to select which social bookmarking links to display at the end of each blog post. You can select among 65+ bookmarking sites, both generic and topic-specific, simply by ticking a box in the admin interface.
On the plugin website, it is explained that the original developer, Peter Harkins, hasn’t been updating the tool for about eight months, and that the project has therefore been maintained by a second developer, who also recently added some interesting features to it.
While displaying the bookmark links at the bottom of the page is the default behavior, that can be easily changed by embedding a code snippet into the code of your WordPress theme. You can also use a snippet to display only a portion of the links, overriding the admin settings. Finally, adding a new bookmarking site to Sociable is also relatively easy and can be done by following the instructions you will find on the plugin homepage.
ShareThis
ShareThis is yet another useful tool to share your posts with the rest of the world. Apart from the usual social bookmarking sites, it also allows you to send your post link via email, AIM, Facebook, MySpace and much more.
According to the statistics hosted on the WordPress website, ShareThis is also among the most downloaded social bookmarking plugins, with peaks of 2,000 daily hits. The tool is being developed by a company which offers additional integration allowing you to store all your bookmarks on a remote server for easy access.
I Love Social Bookmarking
“I Love Social Bookmarking” (ILSB) is another complete and easy to manage tool for your social bookmarking needs. Just like with Sociable, you are able to add and remove websites from the list with a single mouse click from an intuitive admin interface.
While the features and functionality are very similar to those of Sociable, the main difference lays in the layout: instead of simply listing the links, you can use a scroll-down menu to display the list of websites you want to feature on your site, which might turn out useful especially if you don’t want to use much of your page space. Other options in the admin interface also include the background color in the dropdown menu and other minor details.
Tell a Friend
Tell a Friend allows you to add a “Share this post” button after each post using the service provided by FreeTellAFriend.com, which also has e-mail address book and favorite capabilities.
Tell a Friend Plugin
When clicking on the button, a non-intrusive popup will open asking you what you wish to do: visitors can in fact use their email address books and share the item with their entire contact list once logged once logged into their webmail service, enter the emails of friends manually, favorite the site or simply submit the item to a traditional bookmarking site.
Of all the social bookmarking tools for WordPress encountered so far, Tell a Friend is certainly the most flexible one. Of course, there are minor issues arising from its approach, such as the choice of using popups, which might get blocked by some browsers, or even the possibility to remotely access your webmail server, which means your visitors have to trust that the service won’t collect their login data.
… and many others
Those features in this article are a small part of the plugins listed in the WordPress website. If none of the tools described here fit your specific needs, you can simply make a search to find the right tool for you.
Tags: I Love Social Bookmarking, ShareThis, Sociable, Social Bookmarking, Tell a Friend, Wordpress Plugin
Dario Borghino
Dario Borghino is a computer engineering student at Turin's
Polytechnic, Italy. He started writing science and technology related
articles in February 2008 and his articles have appeared on sites such
as ISEdb.COM, eHow and Suite101.com. You can visit his personal Web site here.
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