17 Popular Social Media Plugins
Posted on: Wed May 29 2019 05:30:00 GMT+0530 (India Standard Time)
WordPress social media plugins are becoming a necessity for WordPress websites due to the rise of social networks.
Are you getting confused about choosing the best WordPress social media plugin for your blog?
Social networks are changing the marketing arena and becoming the most important aspect of content marketing and SEO.
A social media plugin helps any content to become viral by offering features like social sharing buttons and social follow buttons.
Social sharing buttons placed near the content makes it easy for the reader to spot and share the content.
Social follow buttons placed at proper places can drive a lot of visitors to your social media profiles or pages.
More visitors mean more user engagement.
A large number of free and paid social media plugins are available for WordPress which makes it very difficult to choose the best plugin from this large repository.
This collection is aimed at making it easy to choose from the best available social media plugins.
How to choose the Best Social Media Plugin for WordPress?
The evaluation parameters can be performance and utility.
Filling up all the empty space of your site with social media icons may degrade the user experience.
So, it is wise to use only those social networks which are used in social media marketing for your niche.
Also, if the plugin is too heavy, it will slow down your site and increase the response time.
And if your site is slow, then it will be difficult to retain the user.
Also, Google doesn’t like slow sites so it may bring down the ranking of your article for certain keywords.
Look for a WordPress social media plugin that provides most of the functions at a single place like social sharing buttons, social follow buttons, and displaying social counts for showing the popularity of your article.
This may reduce the number of plugins needed.
But it depends completely on your choice, which functions you need and you can choose the social media plugin based on your needs.
Blog2Social: Social Media Auto Post & Scheduler
Blog2Social is a social media automation tool from Adenion.
With the rise of Social Networks, automated social media marketing is becoming a new trend in the blogging community.
Need Social Media Automation Plugin?
Nowadays, it has become easier to automate social media sharing of blog posts with the help of quality plugins like Blog2Social specially created for WordPress.
Automatic social media posting saves a lot of time and effort which you can focus on creating quality content.
The plugin allows cross-posting and cross-promoting of blog posts in a single step on various popular social networks such as:
- Facebook (profiles, pages)
- Google My Business
- LinkedIn (profiles, pages)
- XING (profiles, pages, groups)
- Diigo
- VK
- Bloglovin
Re-publishing blog posts become easy on networks like:
- Tumblr
- Medium
- Torial
Effortless Auto-sharing of images on networks like:
- Flickr
A long list of useful features documented below makes Blog2Social, a must-have plugin:
- Scheduling the posts for publishing at best times.
- Custom scheduling.
- Cross sharing to popular social networks.
- Re-sharing the old posts once or recurring.
- Auto-posting to social networks when you publish a post.
- Editing or adding hashtags, comments, mentions.
- Formatting the post optimally for each network.
- One-step process.
- Keep track of your social activities with the reporting feature.
- Free and premium licensing for flexibility.
Social Warfare
Social Warfare is an extremely useful WordPress social media plugin.
It is lightweight and provides share buttons for all major social media platforms including LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest.
Placement options like above the post content, below the post content, both above and below post content, manual placement, and no placement are available.
Floating share buttons can also be used instead of standard placements.
Social share counts are also available without signing up or registering anywhere.
Though the free plugin is enough for many bloggers, extra options and networks can also be acquired through the Pro version.
Swifty Bar, sticky bar by WPGens
Swifty bar is my personal favourite social sharing plugin.
It provides some of the best utilities together in one simple sticky bar.
The functions it performs are share buttons for popular networks with share counts, the time required to read the article, post title, category, author name, comment count, previous and next post links at one single place.
This plugin is lightweight despite providing so many options.
Different color options and icons are also present.
The plugin is lightweight and supports custom post types.
More options can be found in the premium version.
Shared Counts
Shared Counts plugin is a social media plugin that covers most of the goodies combined with the speed.
Only the popular social networks are included like Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, Pinterest.
Social share counts can be shown individually for each network or combined for all networks.
Multiple styling and placement options like before and after the post are available.
AddToAny Share Buttons
AddToAny is a WordPress social media plugin with a variety of social networks.
It provides options for floating social share bar along with standard placement options.
Integration with Google Analytics provides it with an extra edge.
Low resource requirement makes it perfect for shared hosting users.
Share counts can also be shown without external services.
Sassy Social Share
Sassy Social Share provides a plethora of options.
Share buttons can be placed in the content or kept sticky floating.
Different styling positioning options are also there.
Social counts can also be shown with sharing data extracted with the help of third-party utilities.
AddThis-WordPress Share Buttons Plugin
AddThis WordPress social plugin flaunts a huge list of social networks with responsive and simple share buttons which can be customized according to the device.
It also includes networks like WhatsApp and messenger.
A range of share button options including floating, inline, and expanding makes it desirable.
AddThis-WordPress Follow Buttons Plugin
Like AddThis share buttons, this is a separate plugin providing social follow buttons.
The two plugins are having separate presence may be due to the possibility that many people use themes with any one of the utility missing.
AddThis follow buttons support a large number of social networks including the popular ones.
The buttons can also be placed horizontally or vertically at the top, footer, and sidebar.
Different display themes including dark, light, transparent, and grey make it easy to adapt according to different themes.
A free AddThis account can also give you the analytics.
Various button sizes are also available.
WordPress to Buffer
Buffer is a service that allows automatic and scheduled sharing of content to different social networks.
For using this social media plugin, you need a buffer account.
The basic account with buffer is free with a limitation of three social networks that can be connected.
This plugin automatically shares the updates from your blog to the buffer account for publishing them to different social networks connected to your account.
The pro version of this plugin provides some extra goodies.
Ultimate Social Media
Ultimate Social Media has two similar plugins.
Both can be used simultaneously for separate controls, but unlikely and seldom required.
Popular social share platforms are available in the free version and more can be acquired through the paid version.
You can choose from various stylish designs for your social share buttons.
Social share buttons can be floating, placed before or after posts, through shortcode, in a widget, or any specific location on the page.
Social counts can be shown on the buttons.
You can also display social share buttons in a popup on all or selected content pieces.
Different animations and actions for buttons are available.
Social Icons Widget by WPZOOM
Social Icons Widget by WPZOOM supports a large pool of social media networks.
It supports hundreds of custom icons, different icon sets, and colors.
It can also be integrated to FontAwesome.
It also supports WhatsApp, Viber, Skype, Email, Telephone.
Styles including icons with and without background are available.
Background types include square, rounded corners, round.
Revive Old Post
Revive Old Post is a very unique and useful WordPress social media plugin.
Though it can be used as an auto poster for Facebook and Twitter, it is mainly preferred for its ability to share old posts on the blog.
As the name suggests, it automatically shares new and old posts as per the settings.
Sometimes your old content is forgotten and less seen, but still relevant and useful for many people unknown to its presence.
Resharing of old content on social media platforms provides the content with a new life and great content to the new subscribers.
It can be integrated and used with URL shorteners and Google Analytics.
You can also use hashtags, specify the time between sharing of posts, number of posts to share, exclude specific content pieces and categories, and include links to your blog.
WordPress Social Login
WordPress Social Login is a useful social media plugin for WordPress sites and blogs with the facility to register.
You may have seen a number of sites that allow you to register and log in using your social accounts.
This saves time and effort as some of the data from your social profiles is directly used with your permission to fill up the required fields of the registering site.
The effort to fill up large forms and remembering different usernames and passwords is reduced.
Subscribers can register and log in using their social accounts.
The plugin is free, open-source, and free from any copyrights text or linkbacks.
It supports a decent number of social networks.
WP Social Sharing
WP Social Sharing is a responsive and one of the most lightweight WordPress social sharing plugin.
Share buttons can be placed on media, pages, posts, and custom post types.
It supports popular networks like Twitter, Xing, Facebook, Linkedin, Reddit, and Pinterest.
You can change the button text, reorder the display positions.
The plugin is lightweight because of CSS3 buttons in place of images.
Share buttons can be placed with a shortcode, before and after content.
Simple Social Icons
As the name suggests, Simple Social Icons is simple to use.
You can directly provide the color, size, and alignment settings in the widget form.
Social Login
Social login plugin is an open-source social media plugin for WordPress which connects to 35+ social networks including Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter, Google, PayPal, Instagram, LiveJournal, Yahoo.
This plugin is compliant with GDPR according to the author of this plugin.
The social login integrates with the default WordPress login/register system.
People can register, login, and comment using their social logins which also reduces spam.
The social networks can be added and removed from the WordPress user profile.
Monarch Social Sharing Plugin (Paid)
Monarch is a social sharing plugin from Elegant Themes.
It stands out from the large pool of free and premium social sharing plugins by providing a large number of social features for WordPress in one single plugin.
It supports 40 social networks to choose from with a variety of placing options for social sharing buttons and social follow buttons.
It offers most of the social sharing features one can think of.
- Flyin boxes appear automatically when triggered by a preset trigger.
- Floating share sidebar floats along with the scrolling of your mouse from article start to the end, so that if the visitor at any point of reading thinks that the article is awesome, can easily click and share it.
- Inline sharing buttons above and/or below the posts allow the visitors to share the content when completed reading the article or after scrolling to the top.
- Automatic social pop-ups are triggered by events you specify on the backend monarch menu and flash a pop-up containing social sharing buttons.
- Share buttons on images and videos enable the users to share images on networks such as Pinterest and videos on networks such as YouTube.
- Follow buttons as widgets and anywhere using shortcodes drive the visitors to your social media profiles and/or pages.
- 6 automatic triggers for pop-ups and fly-ins make readers say wow and click on the share buttons.
- Different button shapes, colors and hover effects for making them match with your website color scheme.
- Display social count to show the readers, the popularity of your content and woo the visitors to click on them.
- Responsive design to fit all screen sizes from desktops to mobiles.
- Social statistics to find out what is working and what is not.
- Easy import and export of plugin data.
- Simple dashboard to pacify your eagerness to set up and use this wonderful plugin.
- Inbuilt caching for fast loading and not compromising the website speed.
