Having a social media presence is absolutely necessary for running a website or business successfully. If you have content online, you need to share it on social media. You need to reach a large number of audience that are busy there—all the time. So, it is necessary to share your content on social media and also have social media profiles that your visitors can follow.
For WordPress, you will find a number of social media integration plugins. You can even post the codes manually provided by social media websites to integrate sharing buttons on your website. But the simplest option is to use a plugin.
Now, there are many plugins out there but the simplest one comes with your WordPress Installation. It actually comes with Jetpack. They are called Sharing and Publicize modules. These two modules work as one when it comes to simplifying our social media presence.
Publicize is used to automatically post your new content to popular social media websites. Sharing is used to place buttons in posts, pages and other content to allow your visitors to easily share. These two closely related modules even share a single configuration page.
Activating & Accessing the Modules
- Click on Jetpack in your admin area.
- Expand the module list by clicking on See the other 25 Jetpack features.
- Hover over Sharing and Publicize and click on Activate if not previously done.
- Click on the Configure link that appears on mouse over.
Publicize
If you want to reduce your workload of having to share new links every time, then activate Publicize. Once activated visit its configuration page. On the top you’ll see six popular social networks listed: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Path and Google Plus.
Alongside the list, you will see an individual Connect button. When you press it, you will be redirected to a page to authorize your social account. You can connect one account per social network. You can choose the exact account and configure options like a certain page where you want the link to be shared. You can also replace a social network account with a new one by pressing the Add New button.
For example: Choosing between publicizing on your Facebook wall or a Facebook page that you manage.
There’s even an option to make the social media connection available to all the users of the blog so that others may share content created on your blog to the official social network pages.
Once activated, the link to your new posts will be shared automatically to the connected social networks. At the time of posting, you have these configurable options:
- Changing the Custom Message so that the text that is shared along with the link is what you want.
- Individually selecting the social networks that you want to share the current post to.
Note: Normally, you will find them at the right side of your post/page compose box under Publish options.
Sharing
The configurable option for sharing is present right below the publicize options. You’ll find a couple of social network and link aggregators as Available Services. You will find the buttons to:
- Google+
- Tumblr
- StumbleUpon
Note: You can add a new service by pressing the link that says “Add a new service”. You can then input the service name, sharing URL and 16×16 icon URL.
You can drag these buttons from the available services region to enabled services.
You can also drag the buttons to an area on the right titled services dragged here will be hidden behind a share button. It does exactly what it says.
You can choose to display the icon, text or official button for sharing. If you want to see what they look like, there’s a live preview right there. Another configurable option is the ability to choose where you want the sharing buttons to appear. You can select or deselect:
- Front Page, Archive Pages, and Search Results
- Posts
- Pages
- Media
You can also select or deselect whether to include the sharing buttons in individual posts. Just check or uncheck the Show sharing buttons option while composing a post.
Note: For Twitter don’t forget to enter your username in “Twitter Site Tag”. The tweet link will integrate your @username as mentions in tweets and recommends a follow after tweeting.
Overall, the Publicize and Sharing modules available in Jetpack might not be the sharing plugin of your choice. But it is highly-recommended that you try them. You never know when simple buttons do the magic for you. If you want to see them on a live website, then you will find them right below this post. Try sharing with them.