How to Add Custom Social Follow Buttons to Your Blog Post Signature

Most bloggers have social media share buttons underneath every blog post. These buttons encourage readers to share the content on their own platforms. But what about when you are trying to grow your following on Twitter, G+ or other places? Adding social follow buttons or text underneath your content is just another way to call your readers to action.
Follow Fabulous Blogging’s board Social Media Button Envy on Pinterest.

Here are step by step instructions!

If you are design-impaired, splurge on a few buttons from Etsy. They are around $5.00 a piece, or you can go trolling on Google images for a free set. Just make sure it has all the buttons you want first. Some sets are missing Pinterest or Instagram for example.
If you’d rather make them, you can do so in PicMonkey.
You want to make sure whatever buttons you use look different from your social share buttons. Share buttons are at the bottom of your posts (usually) and encourage people to put your content on their profiles. Follow buttons should be branded in your color scheme and layout. You can also just use text links for social follow buttons (as I’ll show below).
Upload your buttons by going to your Dashboard > Media > Add New (also, you should know that if you click on edit media, you’ll find the FILE URL of the image. That is needed for step 5.
Next, you need to learn a little bit of code! It’s a slight difference if you use text over buttons so I’ll separate it out. The first URL is the URL of the social profile you are directing people to. The second URL should be the file URL.

html for social follow buttons

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Then keep copying and pasting that code until you have a line written out corresponding to each button and profile.

html for text follow links (without images)

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Repeat for each button/text link and change the URLS accordingly.

If you’d like to center the buttons add this code at the beginning and end.

<div align=”center”> at the beginning and then </div> at the end

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The last part is different for every WordPress theme. Where does the code go? I’ll give instructions for the three frameworks I use when I design – Weaver Pro – Genesis – Prophoto.

Weaver Pro

Go to Appearance > Weaver Admin > Choose Advanced Options > Html Insertion. The screenshot will show you what box to put it in.

Genesis

First, make sure you have the plugin called Genesis Simple Hooks installed. Then go to that screen and find this box.

With Genesis, some themes have a widget area that is called “After Post”. In fact, I believe you can get it if you have the extra widget areas plugin activated for Genesis. Prose theme has it automatically. In that case, you can add the code in a text html widget right into that area. To get to it, go to Appearance > Widgets > and find the one that says After Post.

Prophoto

Go to Prophoto>Customize>Advanced>Custom Code and find the post signature area.

If you want to see some signatures in action, you’ll see that Vikki at Laugh-Lines has follow buttons in her signature. For an example of text links in a signature, you can check out KC and the RealCoake family. Also, I have an elaborate signature on my personal blog at JulieDeNeen.com.