A social sharing plugin allows your website visitors to share your website content easily on social media sites. This helps to increase the overall awareness of your website.
There are already dozens of existing social sharing plugins that you can just install and be done with it, but where’s the fun in that?
In this tutorial, I’ll show you how to build your very own social sharing plugin for WordPress from scratch, which can add social sharing buttons below every post. Users can share the post simply by clicking on the desired social media site button.
Why Do You Need Social Media Share Buttons?
It’s often reported that more than 80% of users consider reading content based on their friends’ recommendations. With social sharing, you give users the ability to share your content with their own networks of friends.
More than 40 billion shares are clicked each day on the web, therefore adding social sharing buttons on your WordPress website is first step to helping to market your site.
Good stuff to get started rolling your own here. Take it a step further by integrating Font Awesome for social media icons (it’s quick: add their CDN link code then drop the elements into the HTML as needed), for example:
Would generate a nice Twitter icon without the use of an image and will allow you to style it up with stacked icons, colors, sizes, etc.
Take even a step further by integrating some call to actions with interactive toolbars that might slide in our out to emphasize your social media access. Hello Bar is well known for this. There’s some other solutions and even a way to DIY your own Hello Bar if you’re into rolling your own.
Thank you very much for this article
What about the idea of auto-posting??? please help?
what about the idea of choosing some people (friends) only or groups?? can we do this please help?
This was a great–super easy to implement and style. One issue, recently noticed that LinkedIn has stopped working?! Google+ and Facebook will pull the OG information but Linked in only populates with a generic article link–no featured image, no excerpt, no title…
Any ideas? Google+ and Facebook works as do the other options…just not LinkedIn.
Hi great tutorial… I have a question what if i want to add option where i can select where to show added social share buttons like only on posts, pages, homepage, categories, excerpts and archive etc.