In the first world, where connections are made and ideas are shared, social media reigns supreme. It has woven its way into the fabric of our lives, becoming an inseparable part of our daily routines. As website owners and bloggers, we understand the immense power of social media in expanding our online presence, reaching new audiences, and fostering meaningful engagement. And that’s where social sharing plugins step onto the stage.
Imagine a world where seamlessly integrating social media functionalities into your website is just a few clicks away. A world where your visitors effortlessly spread the word about your content, sharing it with their social networks, and propelling its reach to new heights. This is the world of social sharing plugins—a treasure trove of tools that empower you to unlock the full potential of your content’s impact.
What is a Social Sharing Plugin?
Gone are the days of struggling to make your content heard amidst the digital noise. With social sharing plugins, you can tap into the immense power of social media and harness it to your advantage. Whether it’s a thought-provoking blog post, a stunning visual masterpiece, or an exciting product announcement, these plugins make the process of sharing effortless and efficient.
Benefits of Social Sharing Plugins:
- Enhance Social Media Reach: Social sharing plugins empower your readers to become advocates of your content. With just a click of a button, they can effortlessly share your blog posts with their social media networks, exposing your content to a wider audience. This increased reach can lead to more website traffic, new readers, and potential customers or clients.
- Drive User Engagement: When visitors have the ability to share your blog posts, it encourages them to actively engage with your content. Social sharing plugins make it convenient for readers to share their favorite articles, quotes, or insights, sparking conversations and discussions around your blog. This user engagement can foster a sense of community and loyalty among your readers.
- Customization Options for Seamless Integration: Social sharing plugins offer a range of customization options, allowing you to align the appearance and behavior of the sharing buttons with your blog’s design and branding. From button styles and sizes to color schemes and placement options, you can ensure that the sharing buttons seamlessly integrate into your blog’s aesthetics.
- Analytics and Insights: Many social sharing plugins provide valuable analytics and insights into how your content is being shared across social media platforms. You can track the number of shares, engagement metrics, and even identify which social media networks are driving the most traffic to your blog. These insights enable you to refine your social media strategy and optimize your content for better performance.
- Placement Flexibility: Social sharing plugins offer flexibility in button placement, allowing you to strategically position sharing buttons in optimal locations on your blog. Whether it’s at the end of blog posts, in a floating sidebar, or integrated within your content, you can choose the placement that best suits your readers’ preferences and encourages sharing.
Types of Social Sharing Plugins:
- Social Media Button Plugins: These plugins focus on adding social media buttons to your website, allowing visitors to share your content on various platforms. They provide customization options for button styles, sizes, and placement. Examples include Mashshare, Social Share Icons, Share Buttons by AddToAny, and Sassy Social Share.
- Social Optimization and Analytics Plugins: This category includes plugins that optimize social sharing by providing features to customize the appearance of shared content and track social media analytics. They allow you to control how your content is displayed when shared and provide insights into the performance of your social shares. Examples include Blog2Social, Open Social Share, Jetpack Social Sharing, and Social Snap.
- Social Follow Plugins: These plugins focus on increasing your social media following by adding social media follow buttons to your website. They allow visitors to easily connect with your social profiles. Examples include Grow Social by Mediavine and Shareaholic.
- Click-to-Tweet Plugins: Click-to-Tweet plugins are designed to create tweetable snippets within your content, making it easy for readers to share specific quotes or messages on Twitter. An example of this type of plugin is Click To Tweet.
Top Social Sharing Plugins of 2023:
1. Revive Social
Price: Various options available; Personal: $75 per year, Business: $149 per year, Marketer: $299
Revive Social is a widely recognized social media plugin for WordPress that aims to increase traffic to your older blog posts. This plugin automates the process of scheduling and sharing your old posts on various social media platforms, all without having to leave your WordPress dashboard.
You have full control over your social shares. You can choose to include just the title of your posts or add hashtags, customize the title, or shorten links. Additionally, you can decide if you want your posts to be shared more than once and keep track of the clicks your content receives through this plugin. It supports sharing on Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, and Tumblr.
What We Like: The plugin allows you to add message and hashtag variations, ensuring your content remains fresh.
2. Spotlight
Price: Various options available; Essentials: $39 yearly, Pro: $59 yearly, Performance: $99 yearly, free option also available
Spotlight is a plugin that enables you to display your Instagram feed on your WordPress site. It offers a live interactive preview of your Instagram feed, and the best part is that no coding is required. The plugin is fully responsive, ensuring that the gallery adapts to any device.
Customization is a key feature of Spotlight. It pulls the font style from your theme and provides over 40 customization options. You can choose the number of posts to display, adjust padding size, layout, button styles, and background color. The plugin also allows you to select a template that matches your site’s theme. With its user-friendly point-and-click interface, customization becomes a breeze.
Spotlight PRO unlocks additional features, such as pre-built themes, hashtag feeds and filtering, moderation, stoppable Instagram, and integration with WooCommerce. The standout feature of PRO is the Promote feature, which enables you to link specific photos to blog posts, products, pages, or custom URLs, ultimately driving conversions directly from the embedded feed.
What We Like: Spotlight is SEO-friendly, helping you optimize your site for better search engine rankings.
3. Monarch Social Sharing Plugin
Price: $89 per year, $249 lifetime
Monarch by ElegantThemes is another noteworthy social media plugin for WordPress. It offers a selection of over 20 social sharing networks, including popular platforms like Linkedin, Pinterest, Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr.
One of Monarch’s standout features is its extensive range of placement options for social sharing buttons. You can choose to have the buttons as a floating sidebar, automatic fly-ins, on images and videos, as an automatic pop-up, or above/below content.
The plugin also provides image-sharing functionality, eliminating the need for an additional plugin to share media files on social networks. Monarch allows you to customize the appearance of the sharing buttons and display share counts.
What We Like: Monarch offers a timed delay option that allows social media icons to appear after readers have spent a certain amount of time on the page.
4. Social Warfare
Price: $29 for a single site, $89 for up to 5 sites, $139 for up to 10 sites, $349 for unlimited sites
Social Warfare is a fully responsive plugin with over a million downloads, making it one of the best social media plugins for WordPress. It provides beautiful and highly customizable social sharing buttons that enhance your site’s aesthetic without sacrificing performance. The plugin is easy to set up and use.
One notable feature of Social Warfare is the option to upload Pinterest-specific images and descriptions, effectively driving traffic from the popular image-sharing platform. Additionally, the plugin includes a widget that showcases your most popular content based on social shares.
Social Warfare offers comprehensive social data analysis by automatically adding UTM tracking to shared links. This allows you to track the performance of your social shares.
What We Like: Social Warfare is lightweight and fast-loading, ensuring it doesn’t slow down your site.
5. Easy Social Share Buttons for WordPress
Price: $22
Easy Social Share Buttons for WordPress is a comprehensive solution for social media integration. Compatible with over 50 social media networks, the plugin offers more than 30 automated display methods and allows for extensive customization of buttons.
The plugin includes a widget that you can place in the sidebar or anywhere using a shortcode to display your social media profiles and follower counts.
What We Like: Easy Social Share Buttons for WordPress features an inline Tweet share option, which is particularly useful if you are active on Twitter.
6. ARSocial
Price: $20
ARSocial is a complete social media plugin that fulfills all your social media integration requirements for your WordPress site. It offers several helpful features, including social sharing, social media fan counter, and content locking.
The plugin supports over 35 different social media sites and provides flexible placement options for social sharing buttons, maximizing conversion potential. It also includes an automatic display feature that shows social media buttons at specific locations. The content locker feature helps boost conversions, and ARSocial allows you to customize button designs to match your branding.
ARSocial features a built-in analytics feature that provides insights into the performance of your social sharing efforts, allowing you to identify what works best and areas for improvement.
What We Like: This plugin is user-friendly, making it a great option for beginners.
7. Social Share & Locker Pro WordPress Plugin
Price: $10
Social Share & Locker Pro WordPress is a comprehensive solution for promoting your content on social media. The plugin helps you place your social icons in the optimal location with just a few clicks.
It also offers the option to lock content, allowing it to be unlocked only after visitors share the content on social media. With ten predefined themes, retina-ready design, and readable fonts, the plugin ensures a visually appealing integration.
What We Like: You have the flexibility to choose whether to display the entire social media platform name or just the icon on the buttons.
8. AX Social Stream
Price: $24
AX Social Stream offers similar features to the previously mentioned plugins. It allows users to combine all their social networking activities into a single social stream and display it on their WordPress site.
The plugin supports 15 social networks and offers over 28 feed options. Visitors can share your posts on Facebook, Twitter, Google, or Linkedin directly from your website.
What We Like: AX Social Stream focuses on doing what it does well, providing excellent functionality without trying to do too much.
9. Instagram Theatre
Price: $16
Instagram Theatre is a visually appealing plugin that helps you create an attractive Instagram portfolio or gallery on your WordPress site. It offers an easy way to pull photos from your Instagram account and display them in various modes, such as Fullscreen Layout, Thumbnail Layout, List Layout, Instagram Feed, Tag Instagram Feed, User Instagram Feed, and more.
The plugin provides customization options to enhance the user experience, including changing the view and adding filters to the pictures. The backend interface is user-friendly, making it easy to navigate and get started.
What We Like: Instagram Theatre is fully responsive, ensuring your photos display beautifully across different devices.
10. Novashare
Price: Various options available; $24.95 per year for one site, $54.95 per year for three sites, $149.95 per year for unlimited
Novashare is a lightweight social sharing plugin for WordPress. It prioritizes speed and performance, ensuring that your site doesn’t slow down. The plugin allows you to create social icons from over 15 different social networks and display them on a floating bar along with share counts.
Novashare offers customization options for the shapes, sizes, and colors of social media icons, allowing you to match them to your site’s branding.
What We Like: Novashare is beginner-friendly, making installation and setup quick and easy.
Factors to Consider Before Picking a Social Sharing Plugin:
- Compatibility: Ensure the plugin is compatible with your WordPress version and theme to avoid any conflicts or functionality issues. Check the plugin’s documentation or support forums for compatibility information.
- Features and Customization: Evaluate the features and customization options offered by the plugin. Look for key features such as support for popular social media platforms, customizable button styles and placements, share count display, click-to-tweet functionality, social analytics, and integration with other tools or plugins.
- User Interface and Ease of Use: Consider the plugin’s user interface and ease of use. A user-friendly interface with intuitive settings and configurations will make it easier for you to set up and manage the plugin without extensive technical knowledge.
- Performance and Loading Speed: Opt for a lightweight and well-optimized plugin that won’t significantly impact your website’s loading speed. A fast-loading plugin ensures a smooth user experience and minimizes any negative impact on your site’s performance.
- Responsive Design: Choose a plugin that is fully responsive and adapts well to different screen sizes and devices. This ensures that the social sharing buttons are displayed correctly and attractively across various platforms, including desktop, mobile, and tablets.
- Support and Updates: Check the plugin’s support options, such as documentation, knowledge base, forums, or direct support from the plugin developer. Additionally, consider the frequency of updates and whether the developer actively maintains and improves the plugin to address security concerns and compatibility with the latest WordPress versions.
- User Reviews and Ratings: Read user reviews and ratings to gain insights into other users’ experiences with the plugin. This can help you gauge the plugin’s reliability, functionality, and potential issues you might encounter.
- Integration with Other Plugins: Consider whether the social sharing plugin integrates with other tools or plugins you use on your website, such as caching plugins, SEO plugins, or content optimization plugins. Compatibility and integration can streamline your workflow and enhance the overall functionality of your website.
- Pricing and Licensing: Determine if the plugin is available as free or premium (paid) and evaluate the pricing structure based on your budget and requirements. For premium plugins, check if they offer value-added features or premium support that justifies the cost.
- Security and Privacy: Ensure the plugin follows proper security practices and respects user privacy. Review the plugin’s privacy policy and data handling practices to ensure that your users’ information is protected and compliant with relevant regulations.
Conclusion:
By harnessing the power of social sharing, content can spread like wildfire, capturing the attention of new audiences and amplifying its impact.
Whether it’s the ability to customize sharing buttons, track social media analytics, or encourage user-generated content, social sharing plugins offer a wealth of features and customization options. They enable visitors to effortlessly share content with their social networks, driving traffic, increasing brand visibility, and ultimately enhancing the overall user experience.
Learn about top social media aggregators here.
FAQs on Social Sharing Plugins:
Are social sharing plugins compatible with different website platforms?
Yes, social sharing plugins are designed to work with various website platforms, including WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, and more. They are often available as plugins or extensions specific to the platform.
Can I customize the appearance of social sharing buttons?
Absolutely! Most social sharing plugins offer customization options, allowing you to tailor the appearance of the buttons to match your website’s design and branding.
Are social sharing plugins mobile-friendly?
Yes, social sharing plugins are typically designed to be responsive and mobile-friendly. They adapt to different devices and screen sizes, ensuring a seamless user experience across desktops, tablets, and smartphones.
