If you want to optimize your site’s performance, integrating it with your social media can be an ideal way to build your audience and strong engagement.
With the availability of plugins, authorizing your social media to your WordPress site is hassle-free!
In this article, I’ll cover some social media plugins to help you boost your overall site’s performance.
Why Do You Need Social Media to Grow Your Website?
As more than 3 billion people worldwide use social media, it’s not surprising it is now the number one tool to increase website traffic.
You can embed your site’s URL on your social media profile page, encouraging your followers to visit your site. On the other hand, you can also use social media plugins on your WordPress website, allowing your visitors to promote your content by sharing it on social media.
This way, you can get maximum engagement and revenue from your audience as their followers will see the post and they may end up visiting your site.
Top 10 WordPress Social Media Plugins Worth Checking Out
Choosing the most effective social media plugins to grow your website’s traffic and social engagement may be confusing as there are many of them available in the market. Therefore, I have listed the top 10 WordPress Social Media plugins to help you decide your best pick.
1. Social Media Share Buttons & Social Sharing Icons
This social media WordPress plugin is a handy tool to help you get started.
Once installed, this plugin provides comprehensive guides on how to configure the buttons’ icons and actions. You can customize all the button options on the WordPress dashboard, and place the icon with a shortcode.
Additionally, this WordPress plugin has some key features, namely:
- Themed button style – allows you to customize the button’s template, margin, and the effect that suits your blog niche. Moreover, you can place the button anywhere you like.
- Rich button options – there are more than 200 social network icon buttons available.
- Icon sharing and linking – lead your visitors to directly share, follow, and redirect to your social network without leaving your site.
The core plugin comes free, but you can buy the premium version for $25 to get many more features. You can also upgrade it according to your specific needs.
The Good
- You can fully customize the button’s style and design according to your niche and needs.
- The plugin works well for any screen size, even there’s further customization for mobile icons.
The Bad
- The rare social media buttons, such as GitHub, are only available for the premium version.
The Verdict
With more than 200.000 active installations, this 4.9-star rated plugin is worth the investment if you want to fully customize every social icon on your site. It’s also suitable if you want to have a consistent web look as you can create a themed icon button.
2. AddToAny Share Buttons
The AddToAny Share Buttons is the most popular share and follow button plugin either for all platforms or WordPress. There are over 100 dedicated social network buttons available.
Add and customize the icon of the button via your WordPress dashboard. You can use the provided icon or your own image. Place the button as a widget, or paste the shortcode anywhere within your site content.
Moreover, it also offers other features, such as:
- Universal icon – you can create an icon button for any unavailable social networks or emails with a customizable universal button.
- Button customization – it allows you to customize the button’s placement and appearance. Choose whether to use a floating bar or a standard icon and place wherever you want in the content.
- Image sharing button – place the sharing button to share images from your galleries, sliders, or slideshows.
- Social share count – you’ll see how the buttons are doing and how many interactions they get.
- Link shortening integration – allows your icon to redirect to a shortened URL or custom Bitly.
You can get all of these features for free!
The Good
- With its extensive features, it’s more than enough to fulfill your specific needs.
- Easy to configure even though it has a lot of features.
The Bad
- Showing pop-up ads to your visitors after the icon button is clicked.
The Verdict
With more than 500.000 active installations, this 4.7-star rated social button plugin is very popular and comprehensive. It’s perfect for a new website owner who wants to start building the site’s traffic at no cost. It’s also suitable for big websites that want to gain maximal revenue.
3. Easy Social Share
With this social media WordPress plugin, you can create more than 50 social network buttons for platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Google+, LinkedIn, and even messaging apps such as WhatsApp, Line, Facebook Messenger, Kakao even SMS.
You can control the buttons’ width, alignment, size, and space between them without any coding. You can display the icon button as a widget in the sidebar, or with a shortcode.
Moreover, It provides more than 55 template packages, 40 button styles, 30 design positions, and 30 animations for your buttons. There’s also a personal template builder to create your desired layout to import or export the styles’ customization to another site.
What is more, this plugin offers additional comprehensive features, like:
- Sharing and performance optimization – provides a live preview of sharing stats on social networks. Also, it allows you to monitor the most engaging button’s position, content’s engagement, visitor’s device type, and post-performance. You will get a detailed monthly report.
- After share actions – allows you to set mailing list subscription forms, follow buttons, and popular social posts that automatically show up after the visitor clicks on a sharing button. Additionally, you can customize the messages that appear along with the actions.
- Profile linking – you can create more than 30 social networks profiles on your site with more than 16 templates and animations.
- Live chat – Get connected with your visitors with WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger Live Chat, and Skype Live Chat features.
This plugin is quite affordable. The regular plan with a 6-month support pack costs $20, the regular plan with a 12-month support pack costs $25.63, and the extended plan with a 6-month support pack costs $149. You only need to pay once in the beginning to get the full features, 6-month support, and lifetime update.
The Good
- The monthly data reports help you to optimize and increase your overall site’s performance.
- Not only does it display your site content’s share count but also regain your lost count whenever you make any permalink changes.
The Bad
- The initial plugin customization is a bit confusing. There’re many aspects – such as template, style, button, display, additional setting, position, and optimization – need to be configured before launching the button.
The Verdict
This plugin, that has more than 500.000 active users and is trusted by big major websites, is suitable for those who want to grow social shares, followers, and develop mailing lists with a single affordable tool. You will also rest assured as you get lifetime free updates with a single payment.
4. MashShare
The MashShare Social Networks is a clean and responsive social media sharing button plugin covering major social networks. To use it, simply embed the shortcode anywhere on your site.
This plugin offers some features that make it worthwhile to have, namely:
- Built-in caching – helps to increase your site’s loading speed.
- Share counts – you can display real or altered share count with or without the social media sharing button. However, It’s not recommended to fake your stats.
- Add-Ons enhancement – some of them are additional share buttons, optimization for social sharing, Google Analytics integration, responsive buttons, share bars, and share Popups.
You can get the core plugin for free, and extend the feature by integrating free or paid Add-ons needed.
The Good
- Choose and pay for certain features you want instead of paying for bundled features.
- This plugin works well with other social media WordPress plugins.
The Bad
- The WhatsApp button is only compatible with iPhone and Android devices.
The Verdict
With 4.8 of 5-star rating and more than 70.000 active installations, this freemium plugin is a great alternative if you want to have effective social media share buttons. You can make the most of its free features and optimize it with other sharing button plugins to get your specific needs.
5. Monarch
Monarch offers 20 major social network sharing buttons and 35 follow buttons. Once you install and activate the plugin, you can use it right away to display any icon buttons you need.
Its intuitive interface allows you to add networks by ticking the icons. Place the buttons on your site as a widget or generate specific shortcodes for each button. What is special, you can place the icon buttons on over five different locations within your site’s layout.
Additionally, this plugin also offers some key features, like:
- Adjustable button placement and style – choose whether to place the icon buttons as a sidebar, inline, media, pop-up, or fly-in icon. You can further customize the behavior and appearance options for each one like the hover effect, shape and color.
- Built-in caching – to reduce your site’s loading time.
- Social share count – allows you to set the minimum number of visible share count to maintain positive social proof, and see share stats and data from the dashboard.
To get the plugin, you need to purchase a membership that includes full access to Elegant Themes’ themes, layouts, plugins, updates, and support without site limitations. It costs $89 for a year and $249 for a lifetime.
The Good
- Offers a designated admin panel within your WordPress dashboard for better user experience.
- It has appealing and highly customizable buttons that you can configure without the need to tweak and tune CSS and HTML code.
The Bad
- The button icons may not be compatible with other third-party themes.
The Verdict
As a standalone plugin, this plugin is quite extensive if you want to have a good looking but feature-packed plugin. However, it is such a waste of money if you will only use the sharing button plugins among the rest membership bundle – themes, layouts, and other elegant themes plugins.
6. Social Media Flying Icons
Social Media Flying Icons is a social media icon button plugin that offers engaging flying icons for all popular platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, Pinterest and more.
With over 30 themes available, you can choose and customize the icon button looks and behaviors according to your needs.
Place the button anywhere with a manual shortcode or display it automatically as a widget. What is great, this plugin allows you to display the icon button within your content.
This plugin has some worthwhile features, such as:
- Custom icons – uploading icons for unavailable social networks.
- Appearance customization – configuring the icons’ size, style, and order through your WordPress dashboard. Drag and drop the icons to your desired position.
- Animation adjustment – you can apply various animation options to the icons.
This plugin is free, and you can enhance its performance by purchasing the Power add-on for $29.49/year.
The Good
- Create and configure the icon button in less than a minute.
- This plugin allows you to create any kind of button according to your needs.
The Bad
- Not all users are comfortable with the floating effect and flying animation.
The Verdict
With a 4.8-star rating and more than 30.000 active installs, this freemium plugin is enough to cover everything you might need without costing too much. However, the free version may not be enough if you want to boost conversion rates as it does not provide sharing buttons.
7. Social Locker
Unlike other plugins mentioned before, Social Locker for WordPress plugin allows you to hide your promising content. There’re seven social networks icons with four different styles to trigger your visitors’ actions. They must click the icon buttons and perform certain actions – such as tweet or share – to see the content.
Customize the button’s style, message, and additional options trough your WordPress Dashboard. Place the generated shortcode to the content you want to hide.
What is more, the plugin also offers unique features, such as:
- Sign-in button – ask your visitors to sign-in to their social media to unlock the content. This way, you can grow your email list.
- Content locking optimization – set how the button locks your content, either using a timer or completely hide the content behind an overlay effect.
- After-click action – configure the following actions after visitors click the button. Lead visitors to input their email address, subscribe to your site, follow your social media, or share your content.
- Stats report – see the total count of your visitors’ interactions with the icon buttons and track which social network is the most promising.
The social media WordPress plugin costs $27/year for the regular license and $130/year for the extended license.
The Good
- Not only does this plugin allow you to boost your site’s traffic, SEO performance, and total ROI, but it also increases your social media followers and subscribers.
- Reach and engage with visitors who are interested in your hidden content.
The Bad
- It may create a bad user experience for visitors who expect to find direct information.
The Verdict
With 4.6-star average rating and more than 12.000 users, this plugin is worth the investment if you want to build a loyal following.
8. Social Warfare
Social Warfare is known as the fastest WordPress social media plugin. The developers are really into performance thus the plugin is paramount for its responsive social sharing power.
Once installed, this plugin allows you to set up your social sharing buttons through your WordPress dashboard. You can place the button on every part of your site by using a shortcode.
It has six modern button designs with eight color themes for well-known social networks – like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Google+ – and more for the pro license. All of them have unlimited design combinations and placement.
You can use the standard or floating share button. Then, automatically place it on every post content or manually on specific parts of your site.
Moreover, this social media plugin also offers more features, such as:
- Pinterest upload button – create a Pinterest icon button that can directly upload and pin images. Moreover, you can control and define which images can be shared by visitors.
- Shareable quotes – create a share quote button from your site’s content.
- Sharing counts and recovery – display the number of social shares that you’ve got and categorized the most popular posts based on the social share count.
The core plugin comes free, but to optimize the social sharing features, you’ll need $29/year for a single site license, $89/year for five sites, $139/year for 10 sites, and $349/year for unlimited sites.
The Good
- You can customize and protect your Twitter card’s and Pinterest content’s description to control the shares.
- It allows you to set up Bitly and Google Analytics tracking to know the click-through rate.
The Bad
- The free version is vulnerable to security breaches due to its Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) flaws.
The Verdict
With more than 60.000 active users, this 3.3-star rated social media WordPress plugin is worth the investment for those who are working towards the best traffic results.
9. Revive Old Posts
Different from the social media plugin mentioned before, Revive Old Post allows you to automatically share your old content to your social media. You can share it multiple times to each of your social media networks to reach maximum engagement.
Once you installed and activated the plugin, sign in to your social media and enable the auto-sharing mode. Then you can start customizing more advanced settings.
Additionally, other features that make this plugin stand out are:
- Customizable auto-share content – set auto-configured captions, hashtags, and even mentions whenever the plugin shares your content.
- Post intervals – you can decide how often the plugin shares your old content.
You can get this plugin for free, but not all of these features are available with the unpaid version. To upgrade the features, you’ll have to pay $75/year for the personal plan, $149/year for the business plan, and $299/year for the marketer plan.
However, there’s a 30-day-money-back guarantee if you don’t satisfied with its performance.
The Good
- The auto-share old content feature lets you maintain great engagement.
- It allows you to sit back and relax after configuring the plugin as it works on autopilot mode.
The Bad
- The share-to-social-networks feature is limited to six channels. The free version only supports Twitter and Facebook, the premium version only offers additional support for LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest, and Tumblr.
The Verdict
With more than 80.000 users, this freemium plugin is perfect if you want to save time in promoting your content to social media. Even though the social networks available are limited, they’re big and the most popular ones. So, it’s enough to boost your traffic and engagement.
10. Social Snap
Social Snap is an easy to use share and follow button plugin. It supports over 30 social networks and apps.
You can customize the button’s appearance, behavior, and location. Choose from four various button shapes and three different button sizes. Simply, place the button as a floating sidebar, inline button, sticky bar, or share hub as a widget or via a shortcode.
Uniquely, this plugin has most features offered by Social Warfare. You can pin images to Pinterest, use a click-to-tweet button, create shareable quotes, get sharing count recovery. What makes it even better, this social media WordPress plugin also offers other key features such as:
- Sharing control – configure and control how your content will look whenever shared on major social networks.
- Sign-in button – let your visitors log-in to their social networks on your site.
- Total and individual share count – not only you can see the total share count from all channels, but also individual share count for each platform.
- Auto-share content – automatically share your old and new content on social media.
The lite version of the plugin is free. However, to get the full features, you need to invest for $39/year for the plus plan, $99/year for the pro plan, and $299/year for the agency plan. If this plugin fails to satisfy your needs, you can make use of their 30-day-money-back guarantee.
The Good
- Easily increase your click-through rates as you can control your social proof and brand image whenever visitors share your content.
- Maintain your engagement with segmented targets by defining different buttons’ looks for different devices.
The Bad
- It may not work seamlessly with other third-party plugins, which can create issues and slow your website down.
The Verdict
With more than 74.000 active users and a 4.7-star rating, this freemium plugin can be an effective option to make the most of your site-and-social media integration. Moreover, this plugin has a worthwhile price-feature ratio. Also, if you don’t really like Social Warfare because of its security issues, this plugin can be an ideal alternative
Sadly, you cannot check whether or not it’s compatible with other plugins on your WordPress site before purchasing it.
Wrapping Up
It’s essential to integrate your social media into your site. Not only you can share your content on your social media, but also let your visitors promote your content to theirs – encouraging their followers to be your audience too.
With plugins, doing that can be done in a few clicks. Here are the 10 social media plugin I’ve recommended.
- Social Media Share Buttons & Social Sharing Icons – a freemium plugin that offers themed button style, rich button options, icon sharing, and linking features.
- AddtoAny Share Button – free, offers a universal icon and button customization, image sharing buttons, social share count and link shortening integration features.
- Easy Social Share – premium, offers sharing and performance optimization, after share actions, profile linking, live chat features.
- Mashshare – freemium, offers built-in caching, share count and add-on enhancement features.
- Monarch – premium, offers adjustable button placement and style, built-in caching, and social share count features.
- Social Media Flying Icons – freemium, offers custom icons, appearance customization, and animation adjustment features.
- Social Locker – premium, offers sign-in button, content locking optimization, after-click action, and stats report features.
- Social Warfare – freemium, offers Pinterest upload button, shareable quotes, sharing count and recovery features.
- Revive Old Post – freemium, offers customizable auto-share content, and post-interval features.
- Social Snap – freemium, offers major features of Social Warfare, and other features like sharing control, sign-in button, total and individual share count, auto-share content, and auto poster features.
As you have known some promising social media plugins, I hope you can make an informed decision to pick one that suits your needs.
Now, it’s time to make the most of your WordPress site using that plugin!
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