8 Awesome WordPress Plugins for Social Networking

Whether you are an amateur or a professional blogger using WordPress, having a few useful social networking plugins for WordPress will help to ensure that your blog continues to receive a steady stream of new and repeat visitors and readers. Some of the best Wordpess plugins for social networking would include:

• BuddyPress: This WordPress plugin will help you create an entire social network. Even better, its completely free and is open source.
• Disqus: This WordPress plugin, pronounced “discuss,” offers a great set of features that will encourage readers to post more comments onto your blog and share more of your content. The plugin also seamlessly integrates everything by syncing with WordPress comments and through the Disqus API.
• Follow Me: This WordPress plugin will display links to any and all of your social media profiles through the use of one button or window. This will allow your readers and visitors to more easily connect with you. These is no coding required as you simply insert the URLs of for your profile pages and then you can start connecting.
• GD Star rating: This WordPress plugin is both flexible and in depth. Hence, it can be used as a simple star rating for each of your posts or products or it can be used to power an entire review website. In addition and besides English, the plugin supports Belorussian, French, German, Hindi, Italian, Polish, Russian, Serbian, Spanish and Ukrainian.
• Sexy bookmarks: With its racy name, this WordPress plugin is considered by many bloggers to be a very attractive bookmarking and social sharing plug-ins. The plug-in also comes with share counters for Facebook and Twitter.
• Smart sharing: This WordPress plugin will power a sliding social bookmarking as well as a set of sharing icons to the left of every blog post. By default, bloggers can choose Facebook, Digg, Retweet and Stumbleupon plus there is an option to include custom codes.
• Subscribe to comments reloaded: This WordPress plugin allow blog commenters to sign up and receive email when a reader leaves a comment. Hence, a reply can quickly be posted and it’s a great tool for encouraging blog interaction.
• WP Greet box: This WordPress plugin will allow a blogger to create tailored greeting messages that are based upon where a visitor came from. In other words, if a visitor to your blog comes from Digg, Facebook and Twitter, they will receive a reminder to “Digg” or “Tweet” your post or to post it to Facebook. The plugin is compatible with WPMU as well as with various WordPress cache plugins – meaning speed will not be sacrificed.

Utilizing some of the above social networking plugins for WordPress will help you to create a much more interactive blog that will not only encourage readers to share your content and bring in new readers, but it will also help to ensure that anyone who visits your blog keeps coming back to read more of your content.