 | How to: Add social share buttons to your website3 Comments8 April 2014 | Cate |
Skill Level: Beginner
We all know how important social media sites have become to the ecommerce industry. We’re constantly told to set up a Facebook page or update our Twitter feed regularly but what about your actual website? How do you direct the people who visit it to interact with you on social media or drive your social media followers to actually purchase on your website? The answer is social share buttons, icons and widgets.
The Like/Share Button
All the major social media sites offer a share or like button. This is a button which you can place on your website so that visitors can tell their friends on Facebook, Twitter and etc about a particular page or product they like. This will update their status with a short description, an image and a link of the product or page on your site. It will not link your website's Facebook page, Twitter Profile and etc. to your website. This, however, will be discussed in a later post. What these buttons do is allow your products and pages to reach a wider audience and, more often than not, people who are yet to discover your brand.
Bluepark already offers social like and share buttons on every product page and every blog post as part of all packages, so there is no need for you to add in any code of your own.
Product Pages
To add them to your product pages just follow the steps below:
- In the admin console go to General / Settings > Settings > Product tab
- Scroll down to the social media section
- Set the Facebook button to the style you wish to display, either
Compact Version 
or Long Version 
- Tick the other social buttons you wish to display
- Tick the Display Social Button Count Totals option if you want the count totals of each share to show next to the buttons. (Please note this option cannot be removed on the Facebook button and is not available on the Pinterest or LinkedIn buttons)
Blog Pages
To add social share buttons to your blog posts just follow the steps below:
- In the admin console go to General / Settings > Settings > Blog
- Scroll down to the social media section
- Select which social buttons you want to feature on each post
- Tick the Display Social Button Count Totals option if you want the count totals of each share to show next to the buttons. (Please note this option cannot be removed on the Facebook button and is not available on the Pinterest or LinkedIn buttons)
- Tick the Display on Category Pages option if you want the buttons to appear underneath each post in the blog category pages
And that's it! Look out for further posts about how to add Social Icons to your site to allow customers to navigate from your website to your Facebook page, Twitter profile and etc and how to add Social Widgets to your site to display your timelines, followers and other content from your social profiles.
Hi Why is there no option to share on Facebook? this would be much more useful. it means if a customer sees a product that someone they know would like, they can choose to share it with them. Or they can share it with all their Facebook friends. Is there any way of me doing this manually for now?
Hi Richard,
How to do this is explained in the first section of this blog post that's called The Like/Share Button. This allows the customer to share the product they like on your website onto their Facebook profile for their friends to see.
Sorry I have just seen your reply. That may be the case, but required a fair bit of work and does not look standard/right together with the bluepark built in options. Can a Facebook share option not be added to the standard options. It cannot be hard and has far more benefit than the like button. I did try to add a share button via 'Add this' but does not pick up the product picture, just text.