Adding Social Media Sharing Buttons
If you have a blog and you want to add social media sharing buttons for your blog posts, this post will show how you can do that. Using sharing buttons on your blog is beneficial, it can increase traffic because if one person shares your post on a social media platform, your posts can be shown to others and can bring in more visitors, as well as increase sharing across devices. It's really simple to set up and it takes about 10 minutes to set up or even less.I tested out as many sharing buttons I could from different websites that offer this service including AddThis, Addtoany, ShareThis and I picked out the best one, which was AddThis. My favourite and the one I use is AddThis, this is because it has a lot more platforms than any other service including, WhatsApp, all Blogging platforms and all of the Email platforms. Also, note that you can use a number of sharing buttons on your blog using AddThis.
AddThis
First of all visit the website www.addthis.com/register and it will ask you to register an account, you can register using your email address or Facebook, Twitter or Google.
After you have signed up you need to choose what type of sharing tool you want they have free and pro services, the free services are absolutely free and they are the ones we want to use to setup, the pro services you have to pay for using their monthly plan.
If you want sharing buttons, underneath your blog posts the first option sharing buttons is that. If you want a sharing sidebar then the second option. If you want to add sharing buttons for mobile version then the third option. All the free options explain what they are and how they will benefit you.
When you have picked your choice, click on setup.
It will then take you to the setup page to setup your buttons, it will also show you a preview of your buttons.
If you want to add your own customised social sharing buttons and add more or remove any from the options they have given you, click on select your own.
This will then give you the option to add as many buttons as you like and allow you to rearrange the order you want them to be shown in.
After you are happy with everything click on Activate down below.
If you are using any of the following platforms then you can simply add the code to that platform. If you are using blogger or another platform or website all you need to do is copy the code given.
Go to your blog, then click on Template, Edit HTML. In the HTML click Ctrl + F and search for </body> and paste the code before the tag.
When you have pasted the first code, it may also give you another code to paste depending on the type of sharing button you added. Especially, if you added the sharing buttons post it will give you another code to place where you want the buttons to appear, search for the following code
<div class='post-footer'>It will display two codes one near the middle of the HTML, and one at the end of the HTML you want the one that is in the middle, so the first tag code.
Then paste that above the html code, the HTML should be similar to the one below in order to have the sharing buttons in the post footer. If you want them in the header then simply replace the post-footer code with post-header and enter the code above it.
Then that's it you are done! You have added sharing buttons to your blog and they should appear when you save your template.
