We test drive five social promotion tools for your blog
Do you want your blog to be featured on one of a growing number of news aggregation and social networking, and social bookmarking sites? For example, digg, reddit, facebook, delicious (formerly del.icio.us), and Propellar are all immensely popular. And, lets be clear about this – if you write content for the web, own a website, sell something online, or just want some attention, being listed on these sites can really help you.
Another type of social networking site, Twitter, has been said to accept about 50 Million new Tweets per day! These sites and tools are not only useful for their readers, but are also great for web authors because they can provide a vehicle for increasing both an author’s and their site’s popularity. And who does not want to be more popular?
Social bookmark sites overview
In the interest of brevity, I am going to stick to the sites that I want readers of this site to be able to connect to very easily. Please know that this list will likely change in the future, possibly before you read this, so it may not match up perfectly with the icons that are in this post when you read it.
digg
digg.com might be my favorite website because I am a hopeless news junky. I visit it three or four times a day during the week, and usually twice a day on weekends, and I do not think that I am alone. In fact, I would guess that there are people who spend MUCH more time clicking on links at digg.com. Users submit, rate, and comment on the links to content of other sites.
reddit.com is a bit more irreverent than digg.com, but it is also a great site for news. My favorite thing about the Internet is that you choose what to click on. There is so much content on reddit.com that one could choose to ignore half of it and still forget to eat for three days while reading through articles in categories such as POLITICS, TECHNOLOGY, GAMING, WTF and many more.
Diigo
Diggo is not a site like digg and reddit. Rather, it is, according to their website, “a powerful research tool and knowledge-sharing community.” Sounds nice, but what does it really do? Well, for one thing, it provides a way for Facebook, Twitter, Google, Yahoo, and other users to collaborate and share research. They have a toolbar, an online community, and the ability for users to set up groups. For educational purposes and fun, this seems to be a great service!
StumbleUpon
StumbleUpon is like a cross between digg and Diggo, sort of. A user navigates to their website, clicks a few categories of interest, presses the “Start Stumbling” button, and off they go. Really, this is a whole lot of fun.
You know what facebook is, but did you know that businesses have been creating a presence there? I have no idea if it will work for them (remember all of the empty IT related functions in Second Life?), but there is no question that facebook’s popularity is a huge reason that companies want to advertise there.
delicious
If social bookmarking has a parent, this is it. This site is a great resource for anyone doing research or checking news, especially tech news. The Hotlist on delicious.com is another list that I check daily. Have a look and see if you do not agree.
Propeller
Propeller is very similar to digg.com and reddit, though it seems a bit more big-businessy to me (just pretend that “businessy” is a word, please). This is probably due to their relation to AoL. I do not know what that relationship is, but “AoL” appears all over the site. But, do not let that keep you from visiting it. This is another daily visit for me.
Ok, so back to this blog and my need for more buttons. There are many tools that websites and blogs can use to include social promotion buttons in content. I am going to take a look at five of these today.
My requirements for the tools include the following:
- Must include single buttons for different social networks
- Must include digg, reddit, Diigo, StumbleUpon, facebook, delicious (formerly del.icio.us), Propellar.
- Buttons must be easy to see, but not look like an advertisement (too big, too shiny, too distracting). People who know what these buttons are should see them easily, and people who don’t should wonder what they are.
For this, I did some research (here, here, and here in addition to many more) and found what appeared to be the five most popular tools for adding in these buttons.
Digg Digg 3.4
This plugin is very easy to use. Simply select the buttons you want and they will be displayed.
I chose to have the buttons shown after the content in a compact style, and it looked like this.
I do not like that the buttons are different sizes, so I am changing them to normal size – it now looks like this. I like much more, though the Facebook button is still a different size from the rest. For those of us who are slightly insane about symmetry, this is not the best situation. Let’s look at some more options.
Add to any
This is a single, drop-down style button and the settings are simple – the button style, placement, and menu style (colors for border, link text, and background) are configurable. In order to place the button, you must use a WordPress widget to place the button in the sidebar or footer. This is obviously a different style from the digg digg buttons, not that one is better than the other. However, for my purposes on this site, I do not think that this one will work.
Sociable
Wow. This one looks much more like what I was hoping to find for this site. Plus, it comes with links to the entire list of social network sites that I want to show. This plugin seems to meet all of my criteria. If there is anything that does not work for me here, it is that the buttons are small and light, which some people may have a hard time seeing. Still, this is my current front-runner.
But, we are not done. There are still two more to test.
I love social bookmarking
This is a well named plugin – I do love it! It does not have options for all of the buttons that I want, but it is very simple and easy to use. Plus, it is compact and really looks great. In the picture below, you can see that the I Love Social Bookmarking it may be a little hard to tell that the line is white, though you can change this to any color you want. Though not all of the buttons that I want are available, I Love Social Bookmarking does include links to most of the popular bookmarking sites. The more I look at this, the more I like it. I may end up changing my requirements just so I can use it.
Bookmarkify
This tool is excellent, and looks very similar to Sociable. All of the bookmark sites that are in my requirements are included (plus many more), and the buttons are small and easy to see.  Really, the biggest difference between this one and Sociable from a user’s point of view is that the Bookmarkify buttons are bright colors all of the time, whereas the Sociable buttons use a hover effect.
Here we go, this is pretty good!
Overall, I am really impressed by the quality of these tools. Each has a great set of features and each is very easy to use. In the end, I am going with Sociable because I like the buttons in that tool the best. This sure was fun. Have a great day!
Related posts
- Choosing My Niche/Market
- Bloggers on Content Strategy
- 7 Ways To Grow A Keyword Seed List For Your Niche Site Garden
- Why Triberr May Be The End of the Social Media Rainbow
- Are You A Keyword Analysis Tool?
Very nie compilation, very useful, thanks for this post, I am using Sociable
Thank you for your kind words, Walter. We appreciate you stopping by! Over the next few weeks, we will be posting much more content. Have a good day!