I’ve been thinking about social sharing and bookmarking plugins recently since I’ve been testing some on this site. After listening to a recent episode of The Podcast Answer man where Cliff (the host @gspn) mentioned testing some social sharing plugins I thought I would write something about my recent experiences.
I’ve used several social sharing and bookmarking plugins over the years and hear are a few things I’ve learned and a couple of new social sharing plugins I like.
Social Sharing Plugins and SEO
Since I come from an SEO background I’m somewhat concerned about page load times. Many Social sharing plugins will slow down your page load times. In fact, all of them except one will have an effect on page loads. Obviously Google factors in page load times in their page ranking algorithm so anyone concerned about SEO should take caution when installing a social sharing plugin that effects page load. If you’re not careful you can loose valuable rankings in Google if your page load slows. While it’s difficult to judge the exact affect a plugin plugin will have on your ranking by slowing page load, some data shows that ranking can be lost based almost entirely on page load.
Social Sharing Plugins and Bounce Rates
Keep in mind that long page loads will cause some readers to bounce off your site quickly. No one likes to wait for pages to load. I stay clear of some very popular websites because of their page load times. Instead I read them via RSS.
Sexy Bookmarks
The Sexy Bookmarks Plugin by Shareaholic is one of my favorites. It doesn’t effect load time much, if at all. In my tests it’s the second fasts loading social sharing plugin.
An additional feature of the Sexy Bookmarks social sharing plugin that I love is the eye catching graphic above the links to the social networks. It’s just an arrow pointing to the social buttons and a handwritten message. There are a several default options for messages. I prefer the message that says “Share the knowledge”. Anyway, the point is that it’s eye-catching and reminds people to share your post on their social networks.
You can place the Sexy Bookmarks plugin at the top or bottom of your posts by selecting the desire preset in the the plugin’s options. However, is is also possible to manually configure placement of the Sexy Bookmarks plugin. Just select “Manual Mode” in the “Menu Placement” options at the bottom of the plugin’s configuration page. Simply input this code into location where you would like the plugin to appear.
You can even put the code into a sidebar widget. Although I wouldn’t do this for obvious reasons. You’ll find you won’t get as many shares via the plugin if you place it in your sidebar.
rtSocial Plugin
I also wanted to let you know about a super lightweight plugin called rtsocial that just launched about 1-2 weeks ago.
The developer uses a non-blocking javascript to help with load time. It loads as fast as any text on your page because it doesn’t make http requests on every page load. The plugin is free, along with support. I’ve had issues with the plugin related to CSS conflicts, but it will probably work on most wordpress templates.
Slick Social Share Buttons
The social sharing plugin I was using up until the day of this post was Slick Social Share Buttons. It waits to load until your page is done, and you can configure it to float next to your content. You’ve probably seen this on a lot of other websites by now.
I prefer the floating social sharing plugins because they ensure that my readers will be reminded to share no matter where they’re at on the page, and sharing will be easy for them when they decide to pass my content around. For those who don’t like to show the number of shares they’ve received it’s possible to configure the icons so that they don’t show a counter.
Well, there’s my two cents on some of the latest social sharing and bookmarking plugins. I hope you find it useful. Let me know what you’re using so that I can go check out your site and take advantage of your social sharing plugin to share you content on my networks.
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