Gone are those days when you would just publish a blog post and wait for readers or visitors to hop over it. This is the age of social media where content is discovered, shared and distributed through “people” who love reading your content and are pleased enough to recommend your service to their friends, fans and followers. Search engines do play a vital role on content discovery but remember the fact that the goal of any website should be to serve the people, not search engines.
The big question is – how do you make life easy for your site visitors so that they can easily share your content across various social sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Digg, Stumbleupon and so on?
One of the best ways to encourage social sharing of your website’s pages is to use blog widgets and buttons. Almost every social network has it’s own widgets page where you can grab some code and embed it on your website’s design template. The widgets and buttons go to work out of the box but there are a couple of disadvantages of using too many widgets and buttons from different social sites.
First, these buttons don’t blend well enough with your site’s design and in some way, they increase visual noise and clutter. Facebook like buttons are blue, Twitter’s retweet buttons are shallow green while Digg’s thumbs up button is grey. When you arrange buttons and widgets from 6 different social networks below your content, they look really bad and knocked out. It’s a general rule that common users don’t like ugly buttons which don’t complement each other
Second, these buttons are fetched from different sites which will eventually slow down your site’s overall loading time and usability.
Third, there is no easy way to integrate these default widgets as an “always on” toolbar which would stay visible, regardless of whether your readers are scrolling all the way bottom to read the content.
Bumpin Social Bar – Ensure Easier Social Sharing of your content
This is why I highly recommend using Bumpin social bar.
Bumpin offers a range of social engagement widgets which are easy to customize and embed on any website or blog, irrespective of the content management system being used to manage it. Bumpin provides a social toolbar and a shoutbox for your website which can be customized with Facebook “Like” button, a Twitter “retweet” button, a visitor chat widget, a site specific search box and lots of other goodies which you can’t afford to miss.
Let’s quickly learn all the features of Bumpin social bar and how you can use this free service to add a lot of social sharing goodness on your site within 5 minutes:
Site Search widget: On the far left of Bumpin’s social bar, you can choose to include a simple site specific search box which can be used by your site visitors to search for content within your site. This is a great way to let your readers find the content they are looking for. The search box remains visible even if a user has scrolled all the way down to read something, so Bumpin’s search widget clearly holds an upper hand – when compared to regular search boxes.
Facebook and Twitter Integration: Another neat thing regarding Bumpin’s social bar is it’s deeper Facebook integration without any clutter and waste of valuable space. The “Like” button, “activity stream” and “Facebook suggestions” are aligned horizontally and they are revealed only when a user clicks them.
And here is how your Twitter feed and mentions will look like:
Hence, there is no need to hunt down all the codes for Facebook social plugin or Twitter widgets and further tweak them to go with your site. Bumpin takes care of all the hassles and integrates Facebook social plugins and Twitter widgets on your site in a matter of few mouse clicks.
Inline Language Translation of your content: Do you get a lot of readers from different countries and have always wanted a better alternative of Google Translate, which offers no branding whatsoever.
Enter Bumpin’s inline language translation widget – a simple magic button which lets your site readers translate a page in any international language of their choice. The translate button performs inline language translation of your content so your site visitors would never feel the need of a third party translation service. The clear advantage here is that Bumpin’s translate widget makes your site more “sticky” and globally acceptable.
Complete Social sharing: All other social sharing buttons are organized under a sleek on-click drop down menu. This is more visually appealing and never harms your site’s design template with tons of buttons and independent widgets floating around like anything.
Customization and branding: The social bar can be fully customized to match with your site’s current design and brand. You can choose a skin or theme and define a preferred placement, size or position for the social bar. The bar can be used to look like Facebook-style chat tab to a full horizontal bar with applications and widgets you have chosen.
Rising posts, Random topics and announcements: This is yet another superb feature most social bar providers lack.
Bumpin displays the hottest content on your website as well as random topics from the social bar itself. This helps your readers discover popular content directly from the social bar, without having to search them manually. No customizations are required – it works out of the box.
Bumpin Shoutbox:
Do you have a forum and you want all the registered users or members to be able to chat with each other, without leaving your site? Apart from the social bar, Bumpin also offers a very useful chatbox and shoutbox widget, adding which will allow your site visitors perform a one on one instant messaging chat, without having to leave your site. You do not need to install anything or write any code to enable a shoutbox or chatbox on your site, simply customize your chatbox from Bumpin’s web interface and copy a few lines of codes in your site’s design template. It’s that easy and simple.
The best thing regarding Bumpin is that their social bar and visitor chatbox is super easy to add to any blogging or CMS platform, with drop-in plugins available for WordPress, Blogger, Joomla, Drupal, Movable type, Tumblr and more content management systems.
Overall, Bumpin is a really cool and useful tool for bloggers, webmasters and anyone who wants to add a layer of interactivity on his site. There are no lengthy registrations or paid signups, Bumpin is completely free to use and you can customize a unique social bar for any number of sites you have.
That’s right, Bumpin’s price tag is $0.
Get a BumpIn ShoutBox or Get a BumpIn Social Bar
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