SEM Blog: Website Marketing Blog

Sociable Plugin

Posted by Linda at April 18th, 2008

Socialable is a plugin for Wordpress which adds a small group of icons below your blog posts that allow visitors to easily add your pages to their favorite social bookmarking sites. You’ve probably seen or used the Sociable plugin on other blogs without even knowing it. It’s probably the easiest and most effective way to add social bookmarking support to your Wordpress blog.

Sociable was authored by Peter Harkins but is now handled by Joost de Valk and is on version 2.6.2 (last updated 3/31/08). Sociable currently supports almost 70 different bookmarking sites such as : Digg, Delicious, Facebook, Google and many others.

Deciding to add Sociable to your Wordpress blog is a win-win-win situation. Yes, it really is so good that it requires three “wins”.

This plugin is beneficial on many levels. It gives your site a Web 2.0 feel, it provides auto-magical offsite search engine optimization since most social bookmarks are public, it can increase unique visitors, page loads and the number of back links in an exponential fashion.

Installing Sociable goes just like installing almost any other Wordpress plugin, the process is fairly straightforward.

1. Download the latest stable version of Sociable (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/sociable/)

2. Unzip the plugin to some place easy to find such as the Desktop or My Documents

3. Use a FTP program (such as Filezilla) to upload the plugin folder to your /public_html/wp-content/plugins/

4. Browse to the WP Dashboard (yoursite.com/wp-admin/)

5. Click on the Plugins tab

6. Find and enable the Sociable plugin

7. That’s it!

Browse on over to the standard Wordpress Options menu and you’ll see a sub-entry called Sociable which contains all of its configuration options.

You might find yourself tempted to simply enable ALL of the social bookmarking site addons - I’d highly suggest against this. Too many icons will prevent people from picking our their personal favorites. Given this I’d suggest picking about 10 to 20 selections. It’s still enough to provide variety but not so many that you can’t locate anything.

Enjoy!