In the past, I have recommended AddThis and ShareThis for social toolbars. I’m strongly considering changing that recommendation.

WP Beginner just announced a new plugin called Floating Social Bar (FSB, for short). I have installed it on a few of my hobby, sandbox, and development sites, including ExpertWebSupport. So far, I really like the plugin. It is easy to configure and works well out of the box. You should see the “out of the box” FSB as part of this post. The only configuration I did was include Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, and Twitter as possible sharing options.

For more information, see Floating Social Bar – Best Social Media Plugin for WordPress.

There are some reasons to stay with AddThis or ShareThis (xThis, for short).

• FSB supports only Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Google+, and Pinterest. xThis includes LOTS more networks. If your herd uses Reddit or Digg or another of the multitude of networks, you should probably stay where you are.
• I don’t see any analytics from FSB. xThis provides a service that tracks what your visitors do with your sharing bar, so you can get reports on how many shares have happened. Maybe FSB has analytics, but it isn’t obvious to me yet.

If you decide to try it out, let me know what you think.