Having social networks presence today is as important as being indexed in the major search engines, the task requires an intelligent strategy and one of the big steps is adding social icons on your website so that people can find you. It took me a while to find a good way to add these icons to my WordPress site and finally I found a free plugin developed by StudioPress; I can’t tell you how easy has been working with it.
The overall look of the plugin is very professional and it actually lets you do some customization to match your site’s theme. I’m about to present you a practical solution to display social profiles on your site.
Showing social icons on a website is a great way to say that you are reachable through social networks and that the site is “alive”. Social networks are good to get people closer and at the same time send the message that a real human is behind the website, so it is a great idea to add those small social icons to your site.
If your website has a lot of traffic then adding these icons will help you to send that traffic to your social profiles and thus create a list of contacts that will be reachable via social media. It does not stop there, these fans, friends, and followers will like, share, retweet, and pin your content bringing more traffic to your site, so there are a lot of good reasons to be socially present.
What can I use if I want to add social icons to my site?
There are thousands and thousands of tools to do this, some are better than others but at the end they all should do the same: display social icons on your site. As I told you before I found a free WordPress plugin to do this and now it is the only one that I use, it is called Simple Social Icons and it really is a smart way to go.
Simple Social Icons offered for free what other tools had on their premium or pro accounts, it also is completely customizable so it can match the theme on your site and something that I really like is the fact that it supports the biggest social networks so far, in other words, you can add social icons for your Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, YouTube, and many other social networks.
Simple Social Icons Technical Specifications… forget it, here is what you need to know
I would like to tell you some of the technical specifications of this plugin but I prefer to give you more practical and useful information.
It requires WordPress version 3.5 or higher- Has a 4 stars rate out of 5
- It can display up to 14 different icons
- Icons can be color and size customized
- Icons can be aligned left, center, or right
- It utilizes a widget form to operate and no setup page is required
The list of icons to display is this:
- Dribble
- Flickr
- Github
- Google+
- RSS
- StumbleUpon
- Vimeo
- YouTube
How to use Simple Social Icons Plugin?
In order to start using this fantastic tool I will describe you three simple steps, once that these are executed your site will be displaying clickable social icons linking to each of your profiles.
- Download and activate the plugin: Simply go to the plugins section on your WordPress dashboard and click “add new”, then do a search using the words: Simple Social Icons. This plugin is currently the 1.0.2 version and it is developed by Nathan Rice. Install it and activate it, after this a widget will be added to the widgets area.
- Add the widget: Go to the widgets area and drag and drop the corresponding widget to your desired place.
- Add your social profiles: Now that the widget was added simply populate the profiles with your links. Make sure to customize the size, color and alignment of the icons so that they match your site’s theme and you are good to go.
These icons will add a professional touch to your site and people will be able to reach you through social media.
Simple Social Icons is a great tool for those people who are not techy guys but still want to add a professional touch to their sites in terms of social networks. My advice right now is to test this free plugin and see if it fits your needs; there are always paid services that you can use and I think that if you have the budget there is no reason for not going that direction but it is always good to save some dollars and see what a free tool like Simple Social Icons can offer.