Add social sharing links to your site

Goal: To have social sharing links displayed on your website.

Ideal Outcome: Your website visitors will be able to easily share your content on their social channels.

Pre-requisites or requirements:

You need to have Sumo installed on your website. If you don’t have it, check this to learn how to do it :

Why this is important: Social sharing links help you engage your users and encourage them to easily share your content. It is important to have them configured for both desktop and mobile devices and to enable users to access them easily.

Where this is done: Sumo & Wordpress.

When this is done: Once, for your actual website and, in the future, every time you create a new site.

Who does this: You, or the person responsible for website management.

• Environment setup

1. Make sure you have access to your company’s social media accounts.

• Configure the social sharing links on your website

For the purpose of this exercise we will use our dummy website, www.asiteaboutemojis.com (yes, we do love emojis).

1. Log in to Sumo using the badge in the top right of your homepage, as shown below. If you are already logged in, click on “My Tools”.

2. On the left sidebar of Sumo, click on social ⇒ share

3. Click “Activate now” to activate the sharing option.
4. Firstly, you need to configure the basic settings.
5. Click on “Settings” to select the services you want to display. Our recommendation is to start with Facebook, Twitter and Email. But you can select the ones that apply to your industry (for example, if you are into quantum physics you may want to select LinkedIn instead of Twitter, just saying). Also, we recommend not to select more than 3 services.

6. Select the “Smart” option to have Sumo sort the share buttons for you.
7. There are a bunch of other settings you can play with, but we recommend you to leave them as default for now. You will be able to modify them later if you want.
8. Now that you have selected the services you want to use, it’s time to configure the layout.
9. Click on “layout” at the top of the screen.
10. As you can see below, Sumo offers you a default layout for both desktop and mobile. By clicking on each position, you can choose to enable the option to override your global settings for that particular position. We recommend you to leave the layout as it is because these positions for both desktop and mobile view are user-friendly and work well with most website designs and devices.

11. Sumo also offers you the option to configure mobile sharing links. This step is optional, but you can do it if there is a service you would like to include specifically for mobile.
12. Click on “Mobile Optimized” to configure the mobile sharing links.
13. Click on “Enable” to enable these services
14. Choose the services you want to include specifically for mobile (Whatsapp, SMS), then click “save”. We also recommend you not to include more than 3 services here.

15. Go to “Display Rules” to choose where you don’t want to include social sharing links on your website.
16. Make a list of the pages where you don’t want to include the social sharing links. For example, some of these pages could be:

• Terms & Conditions
• Privacy policy
• Thank you pages
• Pages available only to members (for websites with memberships)

17. When you scroll down on the “Display Rules” page, you will see the “Don’t Show Rules”. In here, as opposed to when you are going to the movies with your significant other, you make your own rules and you have several options to do so.

• You can exclude specific pages using the exact match of the URL path. E.g. “on URL paths” ⇒ “exactly matching” ⇒ /privacy-policy
• You can exclude entire subdomains and subfolders using “URL paths beginning with”. E.g. “on URL paths” ⇒ “beginning with” ⇒ members.asiteaboutemojis.com or, for a subfolder, www.asiteaboutemojis.com/subfolder/*
• We don’t recommend you to use the option “don’t show on URL paths ⇒ containing” unless you know your website structure really well, because it is too broad and you may end up excluding pages that you don’t want to exclude.
• You can also exclude the homepage, pages that contain articles, mobile or desktop devices and even visitors located in certain geographical areas.

18. Last, but not least, after you are done with setting up the social sharing links, you should configure your selected services by logging in.
19. Click on “services” to connect your social accounts.

20. Click “Connect” to log in to Facebook. Make sure you select only the specific company page that Sumo will have access to.
21. Write your company’s Twitter handle in the box.
22. Click “Save” and you are done.

That’s it. Now you can proudly display your social sharing links on your website and sleep next to your laptop as you refresh the page every minute to count your new shares. May the Traffic be with you.