How to Add Floating Social Sharing bar in WordPress

It’s no mystery anymore, that social media sharing impacts search engine ranking. More people sharing your content on popular social networking sites like Google plus, Facebook, twitter, chances of ranking higher in Google search increases. Many reports (1, 2, 3) proved the same. Now, when it comes to WordPress, there are many plugins to help us add social sharing buttons on our blog.

I have already mentioned about Digg-digg plugin, which helps you in adding Social share button on your WordPress blog, the only down side is it’s little heavy, and slows down the site. A solution is to use custom asynchronous code, to speed up your blog. I’m sure, not all of you are code fanatic, and would love to use the simplicity of WordPress plugin to add features on your blog. Today, I will be talking about Floating share bar WordPress plugin, which will help you to accumulate more social share for your blog.

Floating share bar WordPress plugin: Speedy buttons

This plugin helps you to add a floating social sharing buttons on your blog, which in-turn helps in getting more share. Usually, many of us place social bookmarking and sharing button, at the top, or at the bottom of the post. I prefer placing it on the sidebar or after the post, as user can decide to share or not to share while reading or after reading the article.

Floating share bar plugin will ensure that user will see the sharing button all the time while reading the article, and if they enjoy your article, with one click they can share it on their favorite social networking site. At the time of writing, this plugin supports Google plus, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn,and Pinterest. The best part about this plugin is, it’s fast loading and doesn’t slow down your site. This plugin comes with a configuration option, which will let you add Twitter handle, and default image for Pinterest. You can also enable or disable the floating option, and keep the sharing bar static. Here are some notable features of this plugin:

• Socialite: This feature delays the loading of social scripts until your readers hovers the social buttons on the sharing buttons.
• Share count: This plugin uses the API to get the number of social share. This helps in faster loading of your pages, and default time is set as 30 minutes, which can be configured via setting panel.
• Script for selected social network: Twitter and Pinterest share happens on a new window, so there is no need to call the extra scripts for these buttons. Floating share bar calls scripts for Facebook and Twitter only, and that only when users hover the mouse.

Additionally you can configure this plugin to show share button on Posts, pages or media files. Here is a screenshot of setting page:

The only thing which this plugin lacks is placement of buttons. Having a feature to place the buttons after the post would be a great addition. I’m sure in future we will see more about this plugin, for now you can download this plugin from official repo here.

Do let me know what method you are using to add Floating social sharing buttons on your blog? Are you using any plugin (Name the plugin in the comment) or custom codes?