Okay, I admit it – I am a social media whore. I am highly active on Twitter and Facebook, and have recently become a little bit obsessed with Foursquare and Instagram. Interacting with people all over the world is great fun, and I am severely addicted.

I know there are plenty of you out there just like me. Don’t be ashamed – think of this post as AA for social media junkies.

So I have to feed my addiction by getting more and more followers. The more followers I have, the more people I can interact with. One of the best ways in which you can increase your following is to prominently feature your social media outposts on your blog.

There are many ways in which you can do this. Plenty of WordPress themes come with social media widgets. The problem is, how do you know which is likely to be the most effective in increasing your number of followers? One option is to make the safe assumption that what the big boys are doing is likely to be effective. Enter the blogging giant that is Mashable:

That’s pretty sexy, right? All of their main social media outposts, consolidated into an attractive sidebar widget. I’d quite like to have something like that on my own blog. Oh hang on – I do!

Pretty cool, right? The WP MashSocial Widget plugin allows you to place a widget on your blog that will display your social and subscription options all in one place. It’s like crack for social media addicts.

This is a pretty new plugin and only has just over 5,000 downloads at the time of writing, but that should not detract from its usefulness. The developer is actively working on new features. Here are a couple of new features I would like to see:

• Easy addition/removal of links (YouTube is a notable absentee)
• The ability to integrate a newsletter signup form (the existing subscription form is for email RSS)

These are pretty minor gripes – the plugin is great, and best of all, free.

Download it here.

Creative Commons image courtesy of webtreats