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In order to bring more social media traffic to your website, you will have to use WordPress social media plugins. It allows you to add social media buttons to the WordPress website that will encourage your visitors to share your content in their social networks. This will help your site get better exposure and increase user participation.
It is extremely important for all WordPress experts to know how to add social media icons to the WordPress website since it was launched. Later, it might be more complicated to reach a lot of traffic to your blog if you don’t have social media integration. Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, Stumbleupon and Tumblr are the most popular among social sites, although there are many other social sites that can also be as effective if they are used properly.
Let's take a look at the best WordPress plugins for social media (some are free and some are paid) for displaying sharing buttons on blog posts and other WordPress pages.
1. Social Snap
It is a relative newcomer to the WordPress social media plugin market, but with a well-designed interface, great-looking share buttons, and a lengthy feature list, it’s got a lot going for it. Social Snap does have a limited free version at WordPress.org, but many of the features that we will mention below are only available in the paid versions. Let’s start with the basics – social sharing. Social Snap lets you include buttons for 30+ social networks in a variety of spots. Beyond classic placement options like inline buttons and a floating sidebar, you also get unique options like a “share hub” or “sticky bar”. You can choose between various button shapes, sizes, and colours. And Social Snap also supports both total and individual share counts, as well as the ability to set minimum share counts and recover old share counts if you switched domains or moved to HTTPS. You can also edit your social media metadata to control how your content looks when it’s shared and view in-dashboard analytics to see how often your content is being shared and your best-performing posts. You also get access to features like:- Click to Tweet boxes – Quickly add these boxes to your content to drive more shares and traffic.
- Social media auto-poster – Automatically share new (or old) posts to your social media profiles.
- Boost old posts – Re-shares your older content to Twitter and LinkedIn, to give it a new lease of life.
- Social login – Allows your visitors to log in to your site via social networks (useful if you run a membership site).
- Device targeting – almost missed this feature. You can choose certain networks to only display on the desktop, while others will only display on mobile. For example, you can use an email button on the desktop, but mobile visitors will see WhatsApp instead.
Price: Paid version starts at $39. A paid version with all add-ons starts at $99.
2. Social Warfare
Many WordPress developers often choose this popular plugin that comes in both a free and a premium version. While the free version works for lightweight social share buttons, most of the powerful features are, unsurprisingly, in the pro version. Social Warfare can indeed handle the basics of WordPress share buttons, including things like:- Social share buttons that just plain look good
- Support for all the big social networks (more in the pro version)
- Multiple placement options, including floating share buttons
- Share counts
- Pinterest-specific images. Unlike most social networks, taller images usually do better on Pinterest. To take advantage of that, Social Warfare lets you add a special image that only shows up when your article gets shared on Pinterest.
- Minimum social proof. Share counts are good because they add social proof, but only if you actually have shares! To avoid the awkward situation where a post only has a few shares (that’s called negative social proof), you can specify a minimum share count that must be met before Social Warfare starts displaying numbers.
- Customization. You can easily customize the Tweet that gets shared, add information like Open Graph data, and just generally control exactly how your content will look when visitors share it.
- Share count recovery. If you move your site to HTTPS or change domain names, you normally lose all your content’s old share counts…but Social Warfare can help you recover them.
- Analytics and link shortening. Social Warfare can automatically create links using your Bitly account, as well as set up Google Analytics UTM and Event Tracking so that you know how effective your social share buttons are.
Price: Limited free plugin. Pro version starts at $29 for one site.
3. WordPress Social Media Widget
The Social Media Widget is a simple sidebar widget that allows users to input their social media website profile URLs and other subscription options to show an icon on the sidebar to that social media site and more that open up in a separate browser window. Despite the fact that you can get this widget for free and install through plugins menu, you will be impressed how much it allows you to manage! First of all, it can connect you to 60 different social media platforms, so if your WordPress website is a tutorial platform, for example, there is a high possibility to reach your audience using this social media plugin. Second, there are lots of options to customize your icons as much as you want! Here are some features that come with this plugin: Select from the following icon sizes:- 16×16
- 24×24
- 32×32
- 64×64
- Custom
- Web 2.0 (Default) – Icons from various artists
- Sketch – Social Icons Hand Drawn by TheG-Force and Handycons by Janko At Warp Speed
- Heart – Heart v2 by The Design Superhero
- Cutout – Icontexto Inside Icons
- Custom – These will be unaltered via updates. Make sure you follow the same naming scheme as the other icons (facebook.png, twitter.png).
- Fade In
- Scale (zoom in)
- Bounce
- Combo (All three)
Price: Probably it is the best part because you can get it for free.
Do you have any favourite social sharing plugin that is listed above or it is not in the list? You can leave a comment below and suggest your favorite one. Also, if you face difficulties with installation, our WordPress development agency is ready to help!
