Whether entrusting your hyperlocal website to wordpress.com or using your own wordpress installation, allowing the people who read your posts to share them with their network of friends and collegues using social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter should be high on your list of priorities.
There are many plugins available to make this just a 5 minute job. For this article I will be using the official wordpress.com share option as my example, helpfully it is also available as a plugin for those not using wordpress.com and should be installed and available to those using journal local by the time you read this article.
If you are not on wordpress.com then your first step is to add the plugin Sharedaddy to your site. I won’t go into how to install a plugin here, but you can find plenty of help with that on Google.
From this point on, whatever type of wordpress blog you run, the steps are the same.
In your wordpress admin area, under the settings area on the left you should find a sharing option. Click it.
You are now shown various sharing options. You can ignore the first part of the page about connecting to you networks, and look at the next block of options called Share Button:
If you would like a particular share option to show, then drag it to ‘services here’ and if you would like to offer a share service, but hide it behind a small neat share button, then drag it to the grey box on the right.
Unless you like to keep your blog super clean I would suggest dragging Facebook and Twitter to the left, and any other options you would like to offer to the right. There is a handy live preview just below the drag zones which shows you exactly how your share buttons will look at the bottom of each blog update.
The only other change I would suggest is to make the Facebook share button show as a Like button. People recognise this immediately and understand what will happen when it is clicked.
Have a look at the other settings, you may want to make changes depending on the look and feel of your blog, and then click save at the bottom.
When you now visit your blogs home and posts pages, you should see the share options you’ve just chosen available under each of your blog posts above the comments section:
Now you have share links in place, keep an eye on your visitor statistics and you will hopefully begin to see more traffic coming in from Twitter and Facebook, and when browsing your site you can view how many people have shared on Twitter and Liked on Facebook.
About the Author
Harry Bailey is the founder of Fetch Didsbury, a hyperlocal site servicing the Didsbury area of South Manchester. To pay the bills he works as a freelance php developer and is a Director of Manchester’s Tariff Street Limited web agency.
