Top 3 Fundamental Ways To Make Your Blog More Social.

One of the key criteria for success within the social web is to start and sustain dialogue. Thus one of the most important parts of blogging, beyond creating great content and sharable headlines, is making sure that your blog is comment friendly and social. This means that visitors are able to have in-depth discussions through the comments with extra features. After commenting, they are easily able to share a blog post with others on their favorite social networks, such as Twitter, Facebook, Delicious and others. And finally, if they are interested in getting to know you better, they can easily find your social profiles.

Here are 3 fundemental ways to make your blog more social.

Sexy Bookmarks, is a WordPress plugin that allows visitors to easily share a blog post on a selection of the top social bookmarking and networking sites. Although the number of networks is much more limited compared to Sociable (only 18 to choose from), Sexy Bookmarks is much more graphically appealing. The icons are displayed at half their size, and when visitors hover over them, they pop up. There is also a cute message above the icons that says Sharing is Sexy.

Visit Sexy Bookmarks for more details.
TweetMeme is a button that encourages visitors to share blog posts on Twitter. This button comes in two styles, both including a counter for the number of times a blog post is tweeted. It can also be customized to use your @username in the retweet so you can see who is retweeting your article through your mentions / replies. The button can be added directly into the WordPress template theme, through the TweetMeme WordPress plugin, or directly in a post if you want to only push Twitter promotion on certain posts. Toptenz uses tweetmeme, so feel free to retweet this article for practice! Just click the button right above this paragraph to see how it works.

Visit TweetMeme for more details.
DISQUSS Comment Management System: Is simple to install, but is one of the most powerful tools you can add to your blog to spark conversation if not debate within your blog. DISCUSS allows visitors to receive email notifications of new comments added to a post they have just commented on. This will make the conversation on a blog post go beyond just one stop commenting by reminding visitors to come back and respond to new comments. DISCUSS also allows visitors to edit their own comments after submitting them. Visitors can feel comfortable that their comment is not finalized as soon as they submit it, in case they made a typo. The bonus for you is that you will not have to deal with a lot of requests to edit comments after the fact. Threaded Comments is also a feature in WordPress 2.7 and above which allows visitors to reply directly to other comments, encouraging more in-depth discussions and making it easier for you to reply to your commenter’s as well.

Visit DISQUSS Comment Management System for more details.