Social media is a great resource to help drive traffic to your website. Allowing your visitors the ability to share content from your website to Facebook can provide an avenue, much like putting your ad in the Yellow Pages, for example. In this guide, you can learn how to use the AddToAny Share Buttons plugin to add a Facebook share button to your WordPress website.
WARNING: The instructions in this guide require that you have installed the AddToAny Share Buttons By AddToAny plugin. If you have not installed the plugin yet, you can follow the instructions in our guide, “How to Install the AddToAny Share Buttons Plugin“. Once you have installed the plugin, you will be able to follow the instructions below.
Add a Facebook Share Button
AddToAny simply adds Share buttons on your website, depending on the settings you configure. In this section, you can learn how to configure AddToAny Share Settings to display the Facebook share button as a floating icon on your website.
NOTE: There are many ways you can customize the settings to adjust the appearance of your Share Buttons. The following instructions will guide you through the process of enabling a floating Facebook share button on the right side of your website (on every Page/URL). However, you may add Google+, Twitter and many more social media Share buttons.
- Log into your WordPress Administrative Dashboard.
- Hover over Settings then click the AddToAny option.
- You should land on the AddToAny Share Settings page and the Standard tab appears by default. The Icon Style settings will remain unchanged for our example. In the Share Buttons section, click on the Add/Remove Services button.
- By default, Facebook, Twitter and Google+ buttons will be enabled. You can click on other services in the list to enable them.
NOTICE: You can click on a selected/enabled service to unselect/disable it. You can also rearrange services by dragging and dropping the icons above the list. In our example, we disabled the Google+ and Twitter share buttons.
- Under the Placement section, click each checkbox to uncheck them all. Since we are going to configure a floating icon we do not need to display it in these areas as well.
- Click on the Menu Options drop-down arrow. A setting will appear to “Only show the universal share menu when the user clicks the universal share button“. Click this checkbox, to require a visitor to click (rather than a mouse over) to open the Universal Share Button.
- Scroll down to the very bottom of the page and click on the Save Changes button to preserve these settings. Once the settings are saved, the following message will appear: Settings saved.
- Next, click on the Floating tab.
- Under the Vertical Buttons section, click on the radio button to select Right docked for the Placement setting.
- Scroll down to the very bottom of the page and click on the Save Changes button to preserve these settings. Once the settings are saved, the following message will appear: Settings saved.
Now, when you visit any URL of your website, you will see social media icons docked on the right-side of the page. They will float on the page, meaning as the user scrolls, the social media icons will continue to display.
Now that you have AddToAny configured, you can install the Open Graph for Facebook, Google+ and Twitter Card Tags plugin to control the content that will appear, when a Page from your WordPress website is shared on Facebook.
