We’ve recently added a new feature to the blog to make it easier for you to track and share posts that you like. In addition, this is a simple strategy for encouraging social media traffic to our content.
At the bottom of each post you will notice a series of links. At the time of writing this post, it looks something like this:
Each of these links bookmarks/shares the current post in the respective service. We’ve talked on the podcast before about how these services can be interesting ways to attract traffic. Each of them is essentially a large search engine using user-generated input to filter content and help people find relevant content.
To automatically add these links to each post I’ve used a modified version of the Sociable plugin for WordPress. Free plugins like this are just one of the MANY reasons I love WordPress.
The main change I made was to add text links. Usually the plugin just creates a row of icons (there are dozens to choose from). But I find that confusing for the user. The text links help make the purpose clearer.
For those who are wondering how to do this little hack (and who don’t mind digging into code a bit), here’s how you do it. Open sociable.php. Change line 481 from this:
$html .= “\” />”;
to this:
$html .= “\” /> $sitename”;
I also made a few other aesthetic changes in the CSS to make it look the way we wanted. Anyone else using the plugin? Have you had any interesting results or done something creative with it?
Is there a quality social media application for websites? I use stumble but that does not seem to be too useful. I don’t create blogs, I use full blown sites and all this social media is geared really just towards blogs. How about a decent one for website builders?