WIth the popularity of blogging and rise of social networking many bloggers want to include links to their social network profiles on their blogs.
Displaying your social network profiles is a great way to engage more visitors as long term fans. The traditional RSS and email subscription options work great, but there are plenty of people out there who only want to use Twitter or Facebook to follow their favourite bloggers and websites.
The Cute Profiles plugin for WordPress lets you easily add your social network links to your blog. Install the plugin by searching for the term “cute profiles” in your WordPress admin area.
Not sure how to install plugins? Check out detailed step by step instructions in my blog post How to Install WordPress Plugins.
After the Cute Profiles plugin is installed and activated you will find the Cute Profiles link under Settings in the right hand sidebar of the WordPress admin area.
Cute Profiles comes with dozens of social networks ready for you to add your profile URLs. You can enter as many or as few as you like, it will only display the ones that you enter a URL for so just leave the unwanted ones blank.
You can modify the display setting to meet your preference, and then save the changes once you are done. The buttons for your social network profiles will now appear on your blog.
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{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
They look really cool, but I didn’t even notice them until you pointed them out. Which makes me think that if people do not noticed them, then maybe they will not be effective.
Sure. There is a lot more you can do to make them stand out visually, such as change the plugin settings, add some custom CSS, or set them against a different color background.
I’m testing them for a while here but I have a new design coming soon anyway that will better highlight my own profiles :-)
I agree with Tom to an extent. I’ve noticed them before, but I usually just blow them off because of where it’s located and the faintness of it. This might be good on a site that doesn’t rely on social networking, but you need a more immersive experience if you’re actually trying to engage people on your social networks. This kind of seems more like a billboard. It might catch the eye, but will people interact with it?
So about a week ago I decided to run a test on this. I cleared the stats on my Twitter profile redirect URL, and then set up each Twitter promo on the blog with a different redirect URL so that I could track them separately.
The link published over on the left using the Cute Profiles plugin got 25 clicks, and the link published at the top of my sidebar got 31 clicks. However because that second link is also published elsewhere such as forums sigs and my About page, that makes the Cute Profiles one seem even more effective.
Very interested result, considering the above comments.
Those results make sense considering your social network links in the sidebar are overpowered by the enormous orange subscribe box. A better test would be to put the same social network icons in your sidebar, give them a dedicated link not used anywhere else, then check the results after about a month. In my experience, the links in my sidebar have performed better than when I had this plugin installed.