You actually only need to use one of these but you must have at least one. If you do not have a social connection from your blog, you are leaving a lot on the table. That said, there is a new social plugin coming out every week and how to do determine what is the ideal one for you to use?
In this post, I will go through some of my and my friends’ favorite ones and you should be able to narrow down your search to one that works best for you.
As a blogger and a WordPress designer my self, I deal with the need to connect blogs to the social sites all the time and there was a time when I was only using a plugin called SexyBookmarks, by Shareaholic. Then I found a better one called ShareThis. Let me go through each one and tell you about them in order.
Top 10 Social Plugins WordPress Bloggers Love
ShareThis
My favorite social plugin of all, I now use it exclusively, simply because it is easy to customize if you know how to edit HTML. Even if you do not know HTML, this plugin will let you set up social sharing buttons for each post and page and has lot of settings you can customize the way they display.
SexyBookmarks
This used to be my favorite social plugin before I discovered ShareThis. This is a very powerful plugin and has a very user friendly settings page where you can choose from pretty much all the social networks, which you want to include. There are also many display options that let you control how and where the buttons appear.
The Google+ Plugin
Although you can have a Google+ Plus One button with the above plugins, The Google+ Plugin will go beyond just letting visitors Plus-One your post, it will also let you update your Google+ profile or page status when you add a post, controlling how it displays and other custom settings.
Smart YouTube PRO
Connecting your videos to your blog, Smart YouTube PRO lets you embed Youtube, Vimeo, Metacafe, Liveleak and Facebook high quality videos. It also works with iPhone and iPad. This is the real deal if you need to play videos on your blog.
Social Metrics
It is smart to not just participate in the social media but also to know where you stand. SocialMetrics plugin will let you track your blog on the popular social networks. Know how far each post reaches in the social world, see which posts have gone viral. This also shows you where your blog makes the biggest impact and where you should focus your marketing on.
Twitter Tools
Another good plugin that I use a lot on my blogs is the Twitter Tools. It runs in the background on my blogs and when I add a new post, it automatically sends a Tweet to my Twitter account and announces the new post. The nice thing is, I can automate is so after it does that, my Facebook page has a Twitter app installed on it that will then pick up the new tweet and post it on my Facebook page and with one swoop, my new post has reached out to Twitter and Facebook without me having to do anything.
Social
Although I have not used it before, this plugin is very powerful. It will automatically share the new added post to Twitter and Facebook. It will also pull in any tweets, mentions and comments from Twitter and Facebook and adds it to your blog as comments.
Sociable
Simple and easy to use, Sociable lets you add social buttons to your posts. The nice thing about this plugin is that you can use your own custom icons. This plugin is also well known for letting you create a social skyscraper that you can place on the side of the post instead of under or above the content.
AddThis
With this plugin, just like with others, you will be able to add the social icons to your blog posts and pages but what makes it unique is that when you create an account at AddThis, you will be able to track each share that visitors create. You will have a nice dashboard where you can see how your posts and pages are doing in terms of social reach.
Now you have the tools you need, use at least one of these on your blog to reach out to the valuable traffic-pulling power of social sharing.