Add social sharing to your post with the new Activerain signature feature

Ever since we started using ActiveRain, I have been waiting for this feature to be available and finally, there is now an easy way to add social bookmarking and sharing to your ActiveRain blog. Even better, once you set this up, it is applies to all of your previous post at once and all future articles. Scroll down to the bottom of this post to see it in action.

Before I get into the steps to accomplish this for your own blog, let me emphasize that implementing this is a  huge opportunity and there is no downside whatsoever, so do not just bookmark this post and come back later, but do it now, while reading this post :) It is a one-time setup option and only takes a few minutes to complete. Once done, your readers (and you) can easily tweet your post, share it on Facebook, email it to their friends and in general, generate more traffic with minimum effort on your side.

What you need:

1. An ActiveRain blog - obviously
2. A free AddThis.com account 

Step 1 - Getting your AddThis social bookmark code

I suggest to create a free AddThis account so that you can track sharing statistics later, but you should be able to do this without even registering with them. It takes only a few seconds to set up your AddThis account and the stats they provide for registered members are very valuable. Once you have the account, click "Get Your Button" on the top and select the preferred button style. I selected the one highlighted with the arrow on the screenshot. I like that the most because it shows the Facebook and Twitter icons inline while providing quick access to other social sharing services. Select the one that you prefer.

Once you clicked the "Get the Code" button, you'll see the AddThis code. Copy that to your clipboard. You will have to add it to the new AR Signature field as explained below in Step 2.

Step 2 - Adding the button to your ActiveRain settings

Adding the AddThis social bookmaring button to your ActiveRain settings is pretty straightforward. There is only one trick to know about. So here we go:

• Go to your ActiveRain settings page
• Find the new "Signature" text box
• Important and not obvious: Click the "HTML" icon on the editor bar as highlighted on the screenshot below
• Paste the AddThis code that you copied in Step 1 into this code window, rather than the WYSWYG default editor
• Once you submit it, do not mind that the WYSWYG editor does not show the correctly rendered social bookmark button. It will work on your blog posts anyways.
• Click "Update" below the form to finalize the changes.

If you already had the custom signature set up, be careful when you add the AddThis code in the HTML view. I suggest to add it to the very bottom of your post, so make sure you place the cursor at the location where you actually want the button to appear at.

You can see it in action on all of our ActiveRain blog posts. I hope you found this tutorial useful. There are many other contents you could add to your signature like a call for action for your visitor to subscribe to your RSS feed via FeedBurner or a TweetMeme button to encourage retweeting your post. I have not tested those yet, but once we have them added, I will let you know and I will write another tutorial.

 

-- Zoltan 
RealBird.com