WordPress bloggers are finding social media the easiest and more influential way to reach more readers. There are plenty of Social Media plugins that can optimize your blog and increase its visibility on social media platforms. Here’s a list of top 8 must-have Social Media Plugins:

Share This

This thoughtfully designed plugin enables you to choose sites you want to target and gives readers the option to vote for you. Another great feature of Share This is that you can choose colors complementing your website. The best part is that it provides tracking reports, so you can see how many votes you have received.

Share This is simple and accelerates your online world.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/share-this/

Twitter Tools

This plugin serves to connect your WordPress blog with your Twitter account. Twitter Tools has features enabling you to:

• Place your tweets in the Archive section.
• Develop a post from your tweets
• Create a tweet on Twitter whenever you develop a post, providing a link to the blog post
• Post a tweet from your sidebar.
• Post a tweet from the admin panel of WordPress.
• Send your tweets to another service

An excellent plugin with pretty thorough feature sets.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/twitter-tools/

Digg This

Digg can send a great stream of traffic to your site. This plugin enables you to place a button on your posts using which readers can conveniently digg your posts. The greatest advantage is that you get to choose which posts you want to Digg. You can even display the digg button on your home and archive pages.

To install this plugin, you need to upload the “Digg This” folder to your plugins folder. The next step is to navigate to the Plugins page and activate the plugin. To display the Digg button, you must add a custom field setting the key as ‘digg’ and its value as ’1′.

An interesting and quite simple plugin to use.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-digg-this/

SphinnIt

The plugin basically ads a “sphinn it” button to the blog post that allows people to vote for your post. Although, the button is drag n’ drop, but its position is fully customizable.

With this plugin your readers can easily Sphinn your posts, particularly if its on internet marketing and search related topics.

Good in terms of traffic generation.

http://www.michellemacphearson.com/wordpress-plugin-sphinnit-button/

WP Super Cache

This plugin is pretty useful if your site has to deal with a steady stream of traffic. The plugin enables your site/blog to deliver pages without routing through the database, treating them as static html pages. This makes your server’s work easier.

A static plugin that would especially be of help for slow updating forums.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-super-cache/

Facebook Posted Items

This plugin enables you to share your posts with Facebook users. It accesses posted items from Facebook and displays them in a list with appropriate links and comments. To install, upload the file containing the plugin on your plugins folder. Then navigate to the Plugins page in the admin panel and enable Facebook sharer.

Looking for more ways to socialize and publicize your blog? Try this plugin.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/facebook-posted-items/

I Love Social Bookmarking

This tool makes it easy for readers to vote for their favorite blog posts . All the reader has to do is click on a drop down menu, choose a social networking site and then vote for the particular post. This helps to minimize the screen space devoted to icons on your blog.

One of the best looking and stylish plugins.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/i-love-social-bookmarking/

Social Media Page Plugin

This Plugin provides a list of links to your chosen social media profiles on any networking site.

It saves you from the bother of entering your social media profiles, as it requires you to only type in your username and can access the profile by itself. The list provided is comprehensive, covering a variety of social media sites, which makes your task easier. Also, you can use your preferred keyword to link to the different sites.

The plugin greatly facilitates social networking.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/social-media-page/

Buddypress refers to a group of WordPress MU specific plugins. Each plugin provides a different functionality. Though it has all the features that are associated with WordPress, it enables social networking. Since its modules can function independently, this means you can choose the features you want to. Buddypress also has a core plugin required by other plugins. It enables sharing of functions and helps to make functional changes to the WordPress MU interface.

Features

One of the best features of Buddypress is private messaging. This works like internal site email. Members can message people on their blog network as well as forward and respond to received messages. Through the administrative section, you can send messages to multiple friends as well as to people throughout the network.

Members of a Buddypress network can easily interact with one another as on popular networking sites, by adding a particular person as a friend. Each member can view a list of ‘friends’ and you have the option of making certain posts private.

To allow members to post on a particular content, Buddypress has a section called Wire. This can also be used by members to leave messages on a particular person’s profile. Moreover, you can check out what others are doing on Buddypress, since every activity is recorded. What are the activities within Buddypress? Wire posts, Blog comments, blog posts and more.

The package of plugins also offers status updates for each member logged on. The blog functionality of Buddypress means that one can conveniently find blogs by another member or read the comments on his own.

Finally, installing Buddypress enables one to create and share photo albums. If you are convinced about its features, here’s how to install the set of plugins.

Bloggers just love its multi-user functionality while posting content.

Installation

WordPress MU can be installed just like WordPress. A word of advice – do not edit the name of the wp-config-sample.php file. Doing this will result in a blank page being displayed at your site. The name will be changed during the setup process.

The first step is to download the installation package at http://buddypress.org/download. This will guide you to the most recent release of  the plugin package. After separating the components from the ZIP file, transfer these to a directory on your computer.

To install the components, upload all the component directories and files to the wp-content/mu-plugins folder. Go to the Buddypress-theme folder. You will see two folders inside: Buddypress-member and Buddypress-home. Click on the wp-content/themes directory of the installation. Remove the home folder from your server and upload the two directories to the themes folder.

Go to your WordPress MU admin panel. Provided you have copied all of the plugin files and directories to the correct location, you will see sections under Site Admin titled Buddypress, Profile Fields, etc.

Finally, you need to activate the Buddypress Home Theme on your site. Select the Themes option from Site Admin panel and activate the Buddypress Home Theme. Now go to Design option under Themes and click on Buddypress Home Theme to activate it for your site. If you have done all this right, you will be able to see the new theme through your site URL.