How To: Add Sliding Social Sharing Buttons to WordPress

Adding social sharing buttons to your WordPress theme is a great way to encourage people to share your content on places like Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and so on – It makes it a lot easier for them, rather than copy and pasting your the URL into the website. Im sure you have seen the buttons which align themselves with your page content ( I have fixed buttons to the left of the content on WPLift). I didn’t want to code my own again for a new site I’m working on, so I found a free plugin called Slick Social Share Buttons which will do the job – it offers a lot of customization options so in this post I will show you how to install and configure it.

Install the Plugin

The plugin is free so go and download it from WordPress, Visit “Plugins” > “Add New” > “Upload” and upload the plugin zip file.

Activate the plugin and you will see it adds a new menu to your admin area , under “Settings” called “Slick Social Share Buttons” – this is where you will do all the configuration of the plugin.

Plugin Settings

The first section of the setting page is to determine where the buttons will be placed and how they behave. You can choose a position from Top Left, Top Right, Left, Right, Bottom Right, Bottom Left. So choose one that will suit your theme – I always like to have mine on the left of the site just outside the content area. You can then enter a pixel value for position from center – that again will depend on your theme, and then a pixel value for offset – so this will depend on which position setting you chose.  Have a play with these values untill you get the widget positioned where you want on your site.

You can also set a floating speed and a slide speed – the widget is shut by default and you have to click an image to open it, you can also change this image if you wish.

Choose Display Pages

The next section of the settings page is to choose which pages on your site you want the widget to appear, this will depend on your site layout but I would recommend just using on post pages :

Choose Which Buttons to Include

The next section allows you to choose which buttons you would like to include in the widget and also which versions of them. The options included are :

• Twitter
• Facebook
• Google +1
• Linkedin
• Stumbleupon
• Digg
• Google Buzz

Account Details

The next section is where you can enter your username for Twitter, Facebook page API keys, Facebook image and Google Buzz image if you have chosen those options :

URL Shortener

The final section is where you choose which URL shortener you wish to use, such as Bit.ly, Digg, TinyURL etc and enter your api key if required :