Social Media Plugins
There are quite a number of social media sites out there for you to use for your blog. The most popular and well known are Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, and Flickr. Most bloggers use WordPress for their blogs which offers a variety of social media plugins.
You want to choose plugins that will easily enable your readers to share your content with others. This will assist you in driving more readers to your site, which is the whole point of developing and maintaining a blog.
When considering which plugins to add to your site, you need to consider just what your blog is supposed to accomplish. For example, if you market items on your blog, then you will need plugins that will assist your readers to buy.
The thing to remember is that you should select your plugins carefully as too many plugins can have negative results. Excessive use of plugins can cause your site to perform poorly and clutter your site so that instead of welcoming visitors to your site, they are overwhelmed and leave your site.
The best plugins should work seamlessly with your site and enhance your content. Since you can try any plugin free, the important thing is to keep your focus on your blog strategy. A tried and true plugin that works well will be better for your site than a flashy one that causes problems.
The plugins you add should enhance your readers experience on your blog. Too many plugins have flashy popup boxes that annoy readers or even worse, cover up some of your content.
Among the plugins you should consider are TweetMeme, AddThis, and Akismet. There are very good reasons to installing each of them.
Social Media Plugins
TweetMeme – this plugin is necessary as it allows your readers to easily retweet your blog posts. In addition to helping your readers spread the word about your blogs and your websites, this plugin also enables you to see how your readers are tweeting about your content. This information is vital use to you in forming your content strategy.
AddThis – makes it easy for your readers to bookmark your posts on most social media sites. To get the most from your blog, it is imperative that you know the sites that are sharing your work.
Unlike other, similar plugins, AddThis’s reporting features provide this information to you and inform you of the popularity of your individual posts. Knowing which sites your work is appearing on, will allow you to concentrate your efforts on those sites.
Akismet – is an excellent plugin for controlling spam on your blog. You need to be sure that any content on your blog is valid. Akismet will remove any content suspected of being spam and hold it for you in a queue.
This will enable you to review the comments and then decide if you should post or delete them.
At times, Akismet will flag seemingly valid content. This usually happens due to the website name and the comment is a very generic one.
When you see comments that fall into this category, it is best to delete them as Google will view it as spam and lower your rating. A low rating will mean less traffic to your site.
About the Author: Marcos Garza is the owner of FindRackSpace.com, a site dedicated to pairing website owners with hosting companies. Marcos created his web hosting directory, so users can browse hosting providers based on their website’s needs.
Social Media Plugins
