Adding social media share buttons is a great way to increase engagement across your timeline items as well as a way to increase traffic to your site. If you want to add social share buttons to your timeline items, one method we recommend is by installing the plugin MashShare from the WordPress.org plugin repository. We’ve found this plugin to be lightweight and easy to setup.
Following the steps below, you should have social share buttons on your timeline items within 5 minutes or less.
Install MashShare
The first thing you’ll want to do is install MashShare from the WordPress.org repository. This can be done directly from your WordPress.org dashboard. Select ‘Plugins > Add New’ and search for “MashShare”.
When MashShare displays click on ‘Install’ and then ‘Activate’.
Setup MashShare
Once installed and activated you can head into the MashShare settings page to setup your social networks, the visual appearance, the position and more.
Inside of the MashShare ‘Settings > Position’ tab under ‘Post Types’ you can select which post types you’d like the share buttons to display on. By default ‘Post’ should be checked. This means that the social share icons are only going to display on your blog posts.
Since we want the social share icons to display on our Timeline Express announcement posts you are going to want to check ‘te_announcements’ and select any other post types you want to add them to.
Save and Reload
Once the above steps are complete all you have to do is save the settings page, and reload the page with the timeline in your browser. You should now see the social share icons displaying on each Timeline item. Depending on where you selected to display the button under the ‘Position’ option (and what other Timeline Express add-ons you have installed), your timeline may look different – but should look similar to the following:
Removing MashShare from Certain Pages
If you have multiple timelines and want the share icons to appear on one timeline but not the other, please take a look at our docoumentation on conditionally displaying the MashShare buttons, titled
How do I hide the MashShare buttons on my timeline items?.