Social media has become an ultimate traffic source for a lot of stores. We spend most of our time on social media where we find, perceive and share information. So, it's no wonder social media is a vital element in every marketing campaign now.
Therefore, it not only works for products but blogs as well.
When people find and read an engaging piece, what do they do?
They share it with friends or on their social media pages for others to see. This covers more people who can follow the link and land on your blog page. Correspondingly, you have to let people share your blog posts to get more coverage. And for that, you have to configure social sharing buttons.
Note: we've used AddThis service for social sharing buttons. However, since it has been terminated, the Blog Extension (starting from v2.10.14) now includes a new social sharing buttons option.
To configure social sharing buttons for Magento 2 Blog:
- Go to Stores > Configuration > Magefan Extensions > Blog and find the Social Share Buttons section.
- Enable the following option and Save the configuration.
Once you fill in all the social sharing fields and Save Config, you'll see the social sharing buttons on your blog posts.
In case you use System Settings Template, the social sharing buttons will be available at the top of the blog post page:
However, if you choose the Modern Template, they will be at the bottom, above media gallery:
Once you configure the social sharing buttons, your blog readers will be able to share your blog posts easily. However, it still might not result in as much traffic as you expect it to.
Why would we say so?
What works great for Google and other search engines may not work the same on social media. Where we're going with this is — except for social sharing buttons you have to configure the OG tags for your blog posts.
OG tags allow you to set a title, description and image for your blog posts. They make shared blog posts more attractive and clickable.
Magento 2 Facebook Open Graph is the extension you can use to set OG tags for your blog posts and categories. However, it also works for Magento products, category and CMS pages.