Social Media Guerilla

Opa, Guerilleros!

On my last post I talked about how to extend the life of your social media links with SEO, and one of the tips I shared was to have an attractive and easy-to-use Social Sharing plugin. Today, we’ll go over my two favorite social sharing plugins for WordPress. As you know, we’re huge fans of WordPress for SEO because of the extensive plugin availability and its flexibility.

1. AddThis

AddThis is available free, for any website, not just WordPress. Their API allows social media integration with pretty much any community, and they have a list of 338 services (and growing).  If you’re a developer, it’s a paradise. For us WordPress users, they have their own WP plugin. You need to have an account with them to enable the full set of features for the plugin, but it’s super easy to customize the look and feel of the buttons, it’s placement on the page (above, below, or both), and which services you want to show your users.

Their coolest feature, however, is the free analytics dashboard they provide. It tracks every time somebody uses the plugin, in the form of “shares”, and then it tracks how many clicks that shared link received, so you know what was your site’s ‘VIRAL LIFT’.

To give you a better example, let’s say a user clicks the “tweet” button and another clicks the “like” button – you now have 2 shares. Once the link goes to Twitter, it receives 3 clicks. The Facebook link receives 5. You now have 8 clicks out of those 2 share actions. Finally, AddThis calculates your Viral Lift, giving you a percentage increase in traffic due to shares and clicks.

Reasons why we like it:

• Very helpful Analytics
• Weekly email reports!
• Extensive list of services
• Easy to use

Reasons why we dont use it all of the time:

• It conflicts with a few other plugins in WordPress – not every wordpress plugin is tightly-coded, and sometimes we see errors. Always check your site after implementing a new plugin.

So, AddThis is awesome. It’s my favorite Social Media plugin thus far. I recommend it to anybody, specially if you have a bit more experience with code.

2. Tweet, Like, Share and Plus One

Another plugin I’m proud to recommend is the Tweet, Like, Share, and Plus One.  Despite its name, they offer 5 main buttons -Twitter, FB Like, Google +1, Linkedin and FB Share. On their homepage, they state, rightfully so, that 99% of social sharing is done with these services, so why bother with the other 1%?

TLSP1 also has a great support page and a few other neat plugins – I’ve used the scrolling version of their plugin in one of our sites, and it works very well.

Reasons why we like TLSP1

• It does its job extremely well
• It allows great developmental flexibility
• It’s super fast to load
• Rarely there’s any conflict

Why dont we use it all of the time?

• It doesnt offer analytics

WordPress Social Media Plugins Roundup

Between AddThis and TLSP1, you have everything you could possibly want from a social sharing plugin. Give them both a try, and let us know how they fare in your Guerilla. Leave a comment here with your findings. And if you have a favorite plugin, we want to know about it. Is it better? Why?