Add Social Media Sharing Option to Your Pages / Posts

There is only one reason why you should do this – it leads to more buzz on social media about your pages and/or blog posts, and that can prove to be extremely helpful for your search engine rankings.

With WordPress, you could choose from any of 16 designs for social media icons, and you can also add animation to them, like mouse-over effects or automatic shuffling. The social media icons could also be made to ‘float’. This makes visitors more likely to click on them, and they can be prompted further if you add ‘counts’ to the social media icons. The latter has a psychological effect (most people follow the herd, and if one or a few persons have ‘liked’ or ‘shared’ it on social media already, they are more likely to do the same).

Where should you place the social media icons?

You could do this at the top of the post. If a few people have ‘liked’ or ‘shared’ it, then that means the article must be interesting enough to read.

You could place it beside the post. This could be done in such a way that they always remain there, no matter how much you scroll up or down. Left or right? Research shows that people focus more on the left side – which is why Google has its search results on the left and paid advertising on the right.

The bottom of the post is also a good idea. If the content is great, people will want to click on them after reading the article.

What you should choose depends on the theme you are using, and also the length of the post. If it is too long, people might not get to the end of the article for them to click on the social media icons. If there is space at the sides, you might want to consider placing them beside your post. This especially makes sense if there are other call-to-action buttons at the top – you don’t everything bunched up together that the social media icons are lost in the crowd.

How many social media icons? And which ones?

A study shows that the most social media activity is caused by ‘tweets’, readers mentioning the link to your article on Twitter. This amounts to 38.6% of the total, and in second place is Facebook ‘likes’ (33.8%), followed by Facebook ‘shares’ (26.7%). Everything else is minimal, but LinkedIn can be great if your posts are aimed at those who work in an office. If you are into fashion, Pinterest and Instagram are also good choices.