Putting Back My Blog’s Share Buttons

These days, promoting blogs through social media is a must and there is no easier way to do so than by having sharing buttons in our posts. I knew I have them before my one-year lull in blogging but a check on my plugins did not reveal what went wrong that I lose them. Nonetheless, I know that my blog posts need share buttons for the use of my readers who may find my articles to be worth sharing in their social networks so I did my best to put them back.

This blog is running on an old version of WordPress which I cannot update because the theme I am using will no longer be compatible with the new version. For this reason, looking for compatible plugins and A Beginner’s Guide to generatepress vs astra is now a bit difficult. In the process of putting back share buttons, I lost my dashboard once when I installed and activated a popular plugin. I am lucky to have a son as webmaster who readily found the trouble and had my dashboard back in no time.

There are just a few choices available for share button plugins that still work on the WordPress version I am using. After trying one or two of them, I settled for the free version of 1-Click Retweet/Share/Like plugin developed by LinksAlpha. The plugin integrates 25+ social tools but I chose to have only Google+, Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook as you can see on top of this post.

You will notice that I have both Facebook Like and Facebook Share buttons when most blogs and websites only have one of them, mostly the Like. I made a search on “Facebook Like vs. Facebook Share” before I decided to use both of them here. While many sites about blogging say that they function the same way nowadays, I found that LinksAlpha’s FB buttons work in different ways. The Like button I have here, when clicked, will not allow my reader to add comments before the activity shows on his FB Timeline. The Share button has that feature that some of my readers may opt to use.

Now that my blog’s share widget is back, I know that a big responsibility goes with it. I have to post articles that should entice some of you to like or share with your networks. By the way, you would notice that there will be at least one share to each social network I have above. That’s me sharing my post to my own networks.

UPDATE: I decided to totally remove the 1-Click Retweet/Share/Like buttons after it became incompatible with my WordPress version. In its place, I installed Add-To-Any share button which you can find at the bottom of my posts.