Why enable social network sharing buttons on your website?
Letting visitors share content is valuable in terms of traffic (to attract visitors) and of ranking on Google. Search engines appear to give weight to (public) links shared on social networks.
A shared page shows that the content is interesting and that the site is alive. You could imagine that a search engine like Google might give more or less weight to shared content (on Twitter for example), depending on the reputation of the person sharing and of those who pass it on.
You can also encourage your visitors to share your site's content by email.
The two most used social networks
This is certainly the best known and most used of the social networks we cover in this tutorial. By adding the "Share" button at the bottom of your content, you let all visitors logged in to their Facebook account spread your page. There are different widgets on emyspot to embed Facebook. To find out more, we recommend reading the tutorial: Embed Facebook widgets
Twitter is a micro-blogging platform. Users exchange short messages. By creating a Twitter account, you "follow" users (you can read what they write) and others will follow you (they can read what you write). When you click the Tweet button at the bottom of your page, a pop-up opens and the user can leave a comment on their Twitter with a link to your site's page.
All the other social networks
There are many social networks, as many community sites on which your visitors are likely to share your content.
We let you add many social network buttons, more or less well known depending on the country. Some are specific to a field (Pinterest, for example, specialises in photo sharing and will mainly interest artists or photographers. LinkedIn is a professional network, whose share button will find its place on a job listings site or an online CV.
How do you enable social sharing?
To display sharing buttons at the bottom of your content (pages, blog posts, photos etc..) go to Settings > Global settings > Plugins then tick the Enable social sharing box.
As with all plugins, this option is managed at 4 levels (site, module, module category, item). So you enable the option for the whole site and can then refine your choice by disabling it at the level of:
A module (the Pages module for example), go to Pages > Options, in the Plugins section then untick the box
A category (a page category for example), by selecting the category then clicking Edit then scrolling down to Plugins
A module item (on a page or a blog post for example). When you edit the item in your manager, click Plugins at the very bottom (above the Save button)
* Note that sharing buttons require cookie consent to be displayed.
Display sharing buttons in a page or a menu
You can offer these buttons in the body of a page, or in a vertical menu of your site thanks to the "Social sharing" widget
- To insert this widget in a page:
- Add a row or a column then click Other widgets
- Choose Social networking and Social sharing.
- To insert this widget in a menu: go to Settings > Menus then click Social networking and Social sharing.
The image, title and description text shown on Facebook
When a page is shared on Facebook, a title, an image and a description text are displayed. By default, if you do nothing, the page title, a random image from the page and the text of the first paragraph are used on Facebook. You can customise this information in your manager, for each page, in the Search engine optimisation section of the page.
Enter a title, a description and an illustration image then save.
If your page has already been shared, Facebook keeps the information in its cache. The image or description text may therefore not update when you share your page again. You need to wait a few days for Facebook to update its cache. Another solution is to go to this page and copy and paste the address of the page to "debug".
About the Facebook share button
The number next to each social sharing button shows how many times the content has been shared. On Twitter, it is the number of times the page's link has been posted on the social network. On Facebook, this number takes into account the number of times the button has been clicked, but also the number of times the link has been liked and commented on.
For the detail, try online share-count tools and analyse your page by copying and pasting its URL.
These tutorials could also help you:
Recommend content by email
Invite your readers to recommend your site's pages to other visitors by allowing sharing by email.
Embed Facebook widgets
Here is the list of Facebook widgets you can add to your site, so visitors can follow you.