![](http://s3.amazonaws.com/uploads.shareist.com/stephanieshareicons7516_190769_o.png)
Making social media sharing buttons readily available on your blog or website is a surefire way to encourage your readers to drive engagement. Using a couple examples from my own blog, I will demonstrate a few different ways to incorporate social sharing into each post.
- In this first example, I am using the social sharing feature provided in my blog’s template. Make sure that you enable the post-level sharing function if your blog template offers it. When a reader clicks on any of these icons, it will prompt them to share a message with a link back to the post. My blog template automatically pulls in the title of the post in addition to the link, but the whole text field is customizable.
![](http://s3.amazonaws.com/uploads.shareist.com/share22_190828_o.png)
The social sharing options provided by your blog template may limit the style and location of the buttons on the page so you may want to download a plug-in.
![](http://s3.amazonaws.com/uploads.shareist.com/sharetoolspic3_190849_o.png)
2. In the example above, I used Shareaholics free wordpress plug-in. I was looking for a customizable social sharing bar that I could place at the top of my post in case a reader didn’t make it all the way to the bottom. This plug-in took me under 10 minutes to download, customize and add to my post. A bonus I discovered with this plug-in was the option to make my images shareable via Pinterest.