Social media plugins are an important addition to any WordPress site. By adding social share buttons, you allow visitors to more easily share your content. More shareable content can translate into more views, which could help your search engine ranking.
This might seem overly simplified. There are a lot of other factors that impact on your visibility and SEO. But using a social media plugin does have its benefits.
Benefits of Using a Social Media Plugin
To begin with, using a social media plugin is a great way to make your content shareable. Whether it’s a post, a video or an image, users are more likely to share it if you make it easy for them. Social sharing can help your customers feel engaged, while building brand awareness.
If your content gets shared, then people are more likely to see it. This means more traffic for your site and, hopefully, more conversions. More sharing also means search engines are more likely to see your content. Links to your content help search engines see and better understand your content, which can help improve your ranking.
But choosing the best social media plugin for your site isn’t going to be easy. There are countless free and paid social media plugins to choose from for WordPress. So to help you out, we put together a list of some of the more popular options.
Add to Any
AddToAny is a responsive plugin that helps your users share your posts and pages to any service. The plugin uses Scalable Vector Graphics for the icons, meaning they are easy to resize while working well on Retina and Retina HD displays. It’s customizable, includes share counters and has plenty of other great features.
One handy feature is that AddToAny integrates with Google Analytics, so all of your analytics are in one place. You also don’t need to sign up, log in or open an account.
Plus it’s free. You can download it for WordPress here.
Better Click to Tweet
There are plenty of Click to Tweet plugins and social media plugins that offer this option. But Better Click to Tweet is one of the more popular choices.
The plugin does it what it says: it lets you create tweetable content for your users, using a simple shortcode in the classic WordPress editor or a Gutenberg block. Readers can then share the tweet and a link to the post.
You can download the plugin for free. There are also addons: there’s UTM tags and Premium Styles, both available separately or together as a bundle.
Monarch
Monarch is a popular social media plugin, which comes with plenty of features. The settings are easily customizable so you can taylor the social sharing buttons to suit your needs. You can add your buttons above or below your post, for example, or you can have a pop-up, or even a floating sidebar.
Monarch allows you to add triggers to your notifications, so you can encourage engagement after a purchase or after a certain amount of time spent on the page. You can enable image sharing and include follow counts for your social networks. Plus you’re able to track user engagement.
With all these features, Monarch is definitely a good choice. But it comes as a package deal. That is, you have to buy membership to Elegant Themes to get access to this plugin. There is a yearly and a lifetime membership plan, both of which come with a selection of other plugins or themes.
Sassy Social Share
Sassy Social Share is a simple social sharing WordPress plugin. The icons can be customized and you can select where and how you want them to appear. You can choose from over 100 sharing or bookmarking services.
On top of this, Sassy Social Share is a lightweight plugin. You don’t need to register to use it, and it runs on your website, so it doesn’t communicate with external servers. It also doesn’t use cookies.
It may not come with all the features of some of the other social media plugins, but it is free. You can download it from WordPress.org or have a look at the website here.
Shareaholic
This plugin helps you grow your traffic and market your content, while monetizing your audience, all from a single dashboard. Shareaholic is a suite of audience engagement tools. Included in this are related content and related post recommendations, social share buttons, Google Analytics, and site monetization options.
Because Shareaholic includes all these different functionalities, they all work with one another. This saves you from having to find and install different plugins, which can lead to conflicts and hassles down the road.
You can try out Shareaholic for free, or take a look at the various plans here.
Social Warfare
Warfare Plugins’ Social Sharing plugin is designed to be easy to use and comes with some great features. You can add (and customize) buttons for popular social networks. You can create shareable quotes and custom tweets. You can even display how many times content is shared.
On top of this, Social Warfare caters to your needs. They emphasize the importance of load times and have kept the plugin lightweight. The Share Recovery feature means you don’t lose your social share counts when changing your domain name or moving to SSL.
Get Social Warfare for free on WordPress.org or take a look at the pricing options for the Pro version.
Bonus Plugin: FooBox PRO
FooBox isn’t a social sharing plugin, it’s a responsive WordPress lightbox. So why include it here? Because FooBox PRO comes with social sharing built in.
Take a look at the top of the above screenshot. With FooBox PRO, you can add social media buttons to your images. This allows for easy sharing of your images, which can boost your social shares and improve your traffic.
FooBox PRO is available on various plans, or you can try a FooPlugins bundle which includes FooBox PRO and FooGallery PRO.
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