Download | Official WordPress Plugin Page | Socialize In Development
Table of Contents:
- What is Socialize?
- Socialize Supported Services
- How is Socialize Different from Other Social Sharing Plugins?
- Socialize API
- Socialize Shortcodes
- Installation
- Socialize on the Web
- Help a Developer Out
- Download Socialize
What is Socialize?
Socialize is the easiest way to selectively add actionable social sharing buttons to your posts. All of the social sharing buttons included with the plugin display a share count. Here is a video explaining what Socialize is in detail.
You can add social sharing buttons in two places:
- Inside the content
- In a box below the content
I created socialize to satisfy a few problems I had with current social bookmarking plugins. I believe that using actionable social sharing buttons in your posts will get you more shares. Actionable social sharing buttons are usually created by the service they post to and always contain a number representing the number of shares or views that entry has.
Furthermore, I believe that by selectively displaying the sharing buttons that perform best you will get even more shares. Why is this? Because if it seems like a lot of people are sharing something than it must be important. It’s our human nature.
Here is a video demonstrating how I optimize my website with Socialize.
The plugin was designed to make adding and changing social buttons very easy to manage. Instead of adding new meta keys, like other plugins require, there is an extra settings panel in your posts admin page that allows you to select which social sharing buttons you want to display and in what order. This is to encourage people to choose more relevant social sharing buttons for their posts.
You are also provided with a box at the bottom of your posts that asks readers to subscribe and comment. This text can be edited in the ‘Socialize Admin Page’. You can also selectively display social sharing buttons in this box the same way you go about inserting social sharing buttons in content.
There are all sorts of display settings for the buttons and button types. You can also change the color and look of the Call to Action box from within the Socialize settings.
Check out some screenshots of Socialize on WordPress.org
Supported Services
- Twitter
- Official
- Topsy
- Facebook
- Official Like
- FBShare.me
- Buffer
- Google+
- Sphinn
- Dzone
- StumbleUpon
- Delicious
How is Socialize Different from Other Social Sharing Plugins?
After working with other popular social sharing plugins I found the plugins gave the user minimal control over the look and feel of the sharing button. Although Twitter allows you to set several different settings, most plugins only allow you to choose between ‘large’ and ‘compact’. You miss out on valuable features like adding attribution via your Twitter handle to your Tweets and recommending a Twitter user to follow after a user has retweeted your page. Socialize takes this a step further and lets you choose between several popular buttons to retweet and like content on Facebook.
Socialize also keeps up to date with the most recent and popular social sharing buttons so you don’t have to worry about manually adding them to your site.
Here are some other useful features that separate Socialize from the rest:
- Advanced control over output
- Post settings can overwrite global settings
- Easily change button across your whole site
- Add a Call to Action below your post
- Add buttons using Shortcodes
- Add custom buttons using the API
- Modify the output of Socialize using the API
- Shorten URLs with bitly
- Add Open Graph data to your site
And there’s more on the horizon. Help test new features by following Socialize on GitHub.
Installation
- Upload the ‘socialize’ folder to the ‘/wp-content/plugins/’ directory
- Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress
- Tweak your settings under ‘Socialize’ in your settings panel
- (optional) Choose some default social sharing buttons to display on existing posts
- Selectively display social sharing buttons at your will
Socialize on the Web
Here are some sites that have written about Socialize:
- WPMU.org – Boost Social Proof And Increase Subscribers With Socialize
- The Web Design Ledger – 10 Best WordPress Sharing Plugins of 2012 To Get More Social Traffic
- Speckyboy Design Magazine – Top 10 Social Bookmarking Plugins for WordPress
- Hongkiat.com – Top Social Bookmarking Plugins For WordPress
- DesignModo – Best Social Bookmarking Plugins for WordPress
- Social Media Today – 10 Best Social Bookmarking Plugins for WordPress
Help a Developer Out
Socialize, blogging and developing other WordPress plugins and themes takes up a lot of my time. As much as I love doing it, development slows down when I start taking in side work to pay the bills. If you like Socializeor anything else you see on JonBishop.com, please feel free to give the amount of your choice to help keep me running.
