This post will outline some fantastic WordPress Social Networking Plugins you can use to increase interactivity to your site.

The Social Networking Era

The social Web is a concept, and you’ve got a ton of profiles to the left and right. Each social bookmarking or social networking tool has its own submit link, and while you can just add them all to your theme, you can also rely on a plugin.

Social networking is all connected these days, after all. So why not add a little bit of the social networking web to your site? Show off your Twitter Followers and let your visitors submit your content to Digg. You can do most of that directly in your theme with some custom code (usually found on the various social networking sites’ tools pages), but if you want to take a shortcut or add some extra social Web flair, these plugins may help.

Twitter Tools

Twitter Tools WordPress Social Networking Plugin

Twitter Tools is a plugin that creates a complete integration between your WordPress blog and your Twitter account.
Twitter Tools connects your WordPress blog with Twitter, and lets you send tweets from the blog to your account. A simple settings page makes this a breeze to set up, and you can even control how the tweets you’ve sent should be tagged and handled on your own site. This means that you can have an asides category and send everything posted in it to Twitter, or the other way around.

ShareThis

Used on over 1,000,000 sites, the ShareThis WordPress plugin allows users to share your content through email and 50+ social networks including Facebook, Twitter, Digg, StumbleUpon and Google Buzz.
Sending posts to social bookmarking sites is popular, and this tool adds that functionality to every post on a site. ShareThis is more than just a plugin, it is a service that hosts your submit form, which means that you can get stats and everything if you sign up for an account.

ShareThis WordPress Social Networking Plugin Screenshots

A view of the widget when a user clicks or mouses over it

Sample tracking reports available to registered ShareThis publishers

WP Lifestream

WP Lifestream WordPress Social Networking Plugin

Lifestream displays your social feeds and photos much like you would see it on many of the social networking sites.
The Lifestream plugin easily adds lifestreaming features to your WordPress site. Just install it and tell it what online accounts and RSS feeds it should fetch data from, and then you can include it using a shortcode on a Page, for example. You can also customize each element thanks to the addition of CSS classes, and there is built-in support for several of the largest social media properties out there, although just about anything with an RSS feed will work. And, of course, it is ready for localization as well as being constantly updated, which makes it an interesting option for those of you wanting to lifestream from within WordPress.

WP Lifestream WordPress Social Networking Plugin Screenshots

Lifestream demo

AddToAny: Share/Bookmark/Email Buttons

AddToAny: Share/Bookmark/Email Buttons

Help people share, bookmark, and email your posts & pages using any service, such as Facebook, Twitter, Google, StumbleUpon, Digg and many more.
The WordPress plugin to help people share, bookmark, and email your posts and pages using any service, such as Facebook, Twitter, StumbleUpon, Google, Digg, Delicious, and well over 100 more sharing and social bookmarking sites. New: Google +1 Button in addition to the Facebook Like Button and Twitter Tweet Button.

AddToAny: Share/Bookmark/Email Buttons Social Networking Plugin Screenshots

Drop-down menu that appears instantly when visitors use the share button

Color chooser for your AddToAny menus

This sharing plugin comes with AddToAny’s customizable Smart Menu, which places the services visitors use at the top of the menu, based on each visitor’s browsing and usage history.

Sociable

Socialable WordPress Social Networking Plugin

Automatically add links to your favorite social bookmarking sites on your posts, pages and in your RSS feed. You can choose from 99 different social bookmarking sites!

Sociable has lots of options to customize the social networking icons and links. You can pick your favorite social networking icons and place it on your blog. You can also change their icon sets with your own designed icons.

Socialable WordPress Social Networking Plugin Screenshots

Sociable with its default styling.

The Sociable backend, easily select sites and drag & drop to change the order of appearance.

Wickett Twitter Widget

Wickett Twitter Widget WordPress Social Networking Plugin

Display the latest Tweets from your Twitter accounts inside WordPress widgets. Customize Tweet displays using your site or theme CSS.

Customize the number of tweets displayed. Filter out @replies from your displayed tweets. Optionally include retweets. The widget plugin automatically links usernames, lists, and hashtags mentioned in Tweets to keep your readers on top of the full conversation.

Wickett Twitter Widget Screenshots

Latest tweets display.

Enter your Twitter username, customize your widget title, set the total number of tweets, hide replies, and customize text display in your widget editor.

Tweet Old Post

Tweet Old Post

Tweet Old Posts is a WordPress social networking plugin designed to tweet your older posts to get more traffic.

Tweet Old Posts randomly picks your older post based on the interval specified by you. The primary function of this plugin is to promote older blog posts by tweeting about them and getting more traffic.

The Tweet Old Post plugin does one thing and it does it well, it allows you to automatically tweet about old posts using a specified Twitter account and it provides you with a set of options to make sure that tweet is right.

Tweet Old Post Screenshots

Tweet Old Post

Simple Social Bookmarks

Simple Social Bookmarks WordPress Social Networking Plugin

Simple Social Bookmarks is an easy but powerful way to implement Social Bookmarking on your WordPress blog. It has links to over 200 Social Bookmarking networks – more than any other plugin – and is fully XHTML standards compliant.

This plugin adds a set of cool icons and widgets at the end of your post for your readers to share. Widgets are Twitter and Facebook. It supports large icons and small icons.

 Simple Social Bookmarks Screenshots

An example of the plugin in use, showing colour and movement animation

A full list of the default icons

SexyBookmarks | email, bookmark, and share buttons

SexyBookmarks | email, bookmark, and share buttons

Though the name may be a little “edgy” for some, SexyBookmarks has proven time and time again to be an extremely useful and successful tool in getting your readers to actually submit your articles to numerous social bookmarking sites.

The sole aim of the Sezybookmarks Social Networking Wordrpess plugin was to stray away from the “in the box” thinking behind most social bookmarking plugins, and add a little flair that would entice your readers, rather than deterring them with microscopic icons that get lost in pages heavy laden with content.

Recent Updates

• Facebook Like Button, Facebook Send, Google +1
• Analytics: meet the people who spread your content the most
• Share Counters for Twitter and Facebook
• Official support for Google’s URL shortener (goo.gl)
• Switched over to use the Share API
• Fix for Arras theme
• Fixed slow page load issue
• Loads of behind the scenes performance improvements
• Localized in 15+ languages

SexyBookmarks WordPress Social Networking Plugin Screenshots

Preview of the final outcome with excess networks displayed upon hover

Download the SexyBookmarks | email, bookmark, and share buttons Plugin


To view other great plugins available for your WordPress installation be sure to view our Plugins category.