Social Media Simplicity - 4 Essential Plugins

My grandmother just friended me on Facebook. So, either hell has frozen over, or social media has truly permeated every aspect of life. This multi-generational Zeitgeist is huge and companies are caching in. The best part is it is cheap and easy enough for even the smallest website to take advantage of.

The lazy approach to social media marketing is to install a bunch of plugins, which is the reason why some websites look like a McDonalds playground of colors and floating boxes.

The best plugin approach is to pick a couple strong elements and stick with them. There are 4 essential plugins that draw the most traffic without being incredibly gaudy:

1. Wibiya Toolbar

The Wibiya toolbar is just handy. It is a narrow floating box at the bottom of the screen that allows users to connect to their fav social network sites, without ever leaving yours. They can share content, chat with their friends and 'Facebook', 'Tweet' (funny how those are both verbs now) at the same time. You can also change the color to avoid mismatching color schemes and feng-shui faux pas.

2. Facebook Like

The super simple Facebook Like tool is the easiest way to increase your web presence, especially since Likes have begun to be indexed by major search engines. It is a highly recognizable button that gives your users a nudge to get involved. Once one user gets involved by simply clicking Like, it will be added into activity feeds and begin disseminating through social media. Quite possibly the simplest tool, the button takes only one line of code.

3. Open Authentication or Social Sign-On

Most users are reticent to create a profile on your site and installing a third-party login will greatly increase the people logging in to your site. Your options are the ominous Facebook sign-on or Open Authentication. Open Authentication is becoming increasingly popular, as many people do not want to share all their Facebook details with you.

4. Gigya

Gigya is an all-encompassing tool that handles social sign-on, account linking, rich profile data, interaction, increases participation through prompts, and more. The easy to install solution can be time-consuming for some, but this is just because it is an in-depth solution. It also provides a hearty analytics tool to allow you to see how well your social media efforts are doing.