6 WordPress Plugins That Help Your Content Be More Social

If you are looking for an easy way to give your visitors to quickly and easily share your content with their friends and followers here are six WordPress plugins you can install on your blog that take less than five minutes to install and configure. The more options you give your users to share your content with their network of followers and friends the higher the chances are they will actually do so meaning your content has the opportunity to reach a much larger audience than if you were to be the only one promoting it.

So let your visitors do some of the promotional work for you by installing one or more of the following WordPress plugins:

1. Tweetmeme Retweet Button – Tweetmeme is the popular Twitter aggregator that pulls in the most tweeted links from around Twitter and then organizes that content within categories on the site. This plugin places the Tweetmeme Retweet button into your posts so that visitors to your site can easily tweet out your content. The plugin is loaded with customization options including CSS styling, options for button size, URL shortener API options, hashtag usage, position including the option to manually position the button and the ability to ping tweetmeme every time you publish a post and it also includes some basic analytics so you can see who shared your content. The plugin is displayed on your post in either a compact or standard view and it also displays the amount of times your content has been retweeted.
2. Facebook Share – The Facebook Share plugin allows your visitors to share your content with their Facebook friends. The plugin has almost the exact same features as the Tweetmeme plugin and includes the basic options for positioning, styling, button look and has basic analytics integrated in as well so you can see which of your posts have been shared. The button comes in two versions button or link and you can choose to toggle the counter on or off and have it placed above or beside the button.
3. Google Buzz – If you want to take advantage of the new Google social networking platform Buzz this is an easy way to get your content shared to the service. Just like the Tweetmeme and Facebook plugins previously mentioned the Buzz plugin has options for styling, positioning including an option to manually position and options to hide or show the button. But, unlike the Tweetmeme and Facebook plugin the Buzz plugin comes with the option of 15 different display images and no analytics.
4. Disqus – Why get stuck using the default commenting system currently used by WordPress? You can add a lot of functionality and sharing abilities by switching to another commenting system such as my personal favorite Disqus. Disqus lets your users sign in using their OpenID, Facebook Connect, Twitter account and many other options so they don’t have to sign up to your blog in order to comment. There are also great spam controls and users have the option to send their comments out into their social graphs and this allows their friends and followers to follow back to the site and leave their own comments.
5. Twitter Tools – The TwitterTools plugin by Alex King allows you to pull in your tweets and display them in a sidebar as well as it has the option to post a tweet to your Twitter account using a shortened URL and your hashtags of choice after every post.
6. ShareThis/AddThis – ShareThis and AddThis are competing share services that have plugins available for WordPress and they both work in similar ways by allowing your site visitors to quickly and easily share your content with other websites. Both allow for customization of the button look and which sites or services you want your site visitors to the option to share your content with and both have analytics so you can see which services your content is shared on the most. I currently use ShareThis on my blog and would give them the edge based on their Live Stream service on their site that shows you what is currently the most popular shared content on the network.

Leave a comment below listing any plugins you currently use on your blog that make it easy for users to share your content that I missed.