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Did you know there are more than 3,000 social media plugins available in the WordPress Plugins Library? And, some of these plugins have been downloaded more than 100,000 times.
There are plugins for everything, from adding social share buttons to blog posts and embedding beautiful Instagram feeds, to repurposing content and auto-publishing new posts.With so many different use cases and options available, we reached out to our audience to get their top recommendations.In this post, we’ve curated their top use cases and picks, including:
As we alluded to in the intro, there is no shortage of social media plugins for WordPress sites.In fact, in our survey, 92.4% of respondents use at least one social media plugin.
And, 50% use 2-3 social media plugins on their site.
It is easy to see why you might use multiple plugins. The process of adding a plugin on WordPress is simple. Just log into your site, go to Plugins and click Add New.
Then, you can search for the plugin you are looking for. After identifying the plugin you were looking for, simply hit Install Now.
Depending on the plugin, you might need to create an account or add some code to your site too.
In addition to social media plugins, nearly 50% of our survey respondents have less than 10 plugins on their site.
That’s a good thing since having a ton of WP plugins installed can negatively impact site speed and can even make your site less secure.
Related: The 19 Best WordPress Marketing Plugins You Should Install on Your Website
With so many social media plugins to choose from, we’ve curated a list of the best ones below from social share buttons to auto-publishing tools.
Let’s dive in.
To monitor the impact of your social media marketing efforts, you may have to log into multiple tools to check how your accounts on different social networks are performing and spend hours compiling a comprehensive report. But, with Databox, social media reporting doesn’t have to be a time-consuming chore anymore.
Now you can quickly assess your social media performance in a single dashboard that monitors fundamental metrics, such as:
Now you can benefit from the experience of our social media experts, who have put together a plug-and-play Databox template showing the most important KPIs for measuring the impact of your social media marketing efforts from multiple channels. It’s simple to implement and start using as a standalone dashboard or in marketing reports, and best of all, it’s free!
You can easily set it up in just a few clicks – no coding required.
To set up the dashboard, follow these 3 simple steps:
Step 1: Get the template
Step 2: Connect your Social Media accounts with Databox.
Step 3: Watch your dashboard populate in seconds.
If you are looking for a quick way to add social share buttons to any page or post, then there is no shortage of tools to choose from. Here are the top social sharing plugins that were recommended by our audience.
“This plugin adds share buttons to any page on your website,” says Hannah Wiginton. “Someone who visits your pages can quickly share the blog article or page on Facebook, Twitter, and more.”
Jerome Williams of JWorks Studios adds, “I really like the AddToAny Share Buttons plugin. For starters, it supports over 100 social media websites. There are lots of options, importantly the ability to float on the page and it lets visitors share individual pictures, not just the page. This is great for people who use Pinterest and Instagram. They may not want to share the page content as a whole, just the picture. Regardless, it will always link back to your site and have the potential for driving more traffic your way!”
“Easy Social Share Buttons for WordPress is a versatile social media plugin with over 20 different types of features to boost shares and followers,” says Jyoti Ray of WPMyWeb. “Some of the best features of this plugin are 50+ share networks, 50+ templates, and template builder, click to Tweet, 12 share positions for content, Instagram feed, social live chat, email subscription form, etc.”
Solomon Thimothy of Clickx adds, “This is a must-have for your WordPress site as it guarantees cross-platform compatibility for businesses with multiple social media channels. With the long list of functionalities it offers including a wide variety of button style templates, share counts display, custom sharable content, and after-share actions, you’d think that it’s too good to be true for its price. In reality, this plugin is simply essential for elevating a visitor’s experience and effectively cohering your site with social media platforms. Your business is sure to stand out with its automatic triggers feature that analyzes the audience behavior on the site to automate button displays according to time spent, scroll depth, or user action. It also eliminates worries for developers as this plugin allows users to recover their old share counts in the event of domain switch or HTTPS migration.”
Tom Zsomborgi of Kinsta says, “Novashare is a relative newcomer among the established WordPress plugins, but it already made its reputation as heavily focuses on performance and a clean code base. It’s developed by Brian Jackson and his brother and they are well known for creating high-quality WordPress products. The plugin is regularly updated and has all the features your blog needs. Novashare.io is highly recommended.”
Adam Connell of WP Superstars adds, “While there are plenty of social media plugins on the market, Novashare provides an excellent balance between functionality and performance.
They have a growth-centric feature set but the plugin is incredibly lightweight.”
Max Harland of Dentaly adds, “Kiwi Social Sharing is great to attract viewers’ attention. The best thing is that it supports all the social media websites like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and it’s pretty quick to set up. This means it does not come with a steep learning curve and you can easily customize the basic framework of your social sharing. So, it facilitates driving viewers to your social media handles in a smooth and interactive way.”
“If you want a lightning-fast and beautiful social sharing plugin, go with Social Warfare,” says Patrick Garde of ExaWeb Corporation. “It is one of the most attractive share buttons that can boost your social shares. Place it above the post content, below the post, both above and below, or place it manually. You can also have floating share buttons when users scroll down your page.”
Dan Sears of Cirely adds, “This plugin has been around for some time now and it is easy to use. In addition to this, it has great customer support as well. If you’re looking to increase your number of followers and improve your overall engagement, then Social Warfare may be the right tool for you.
There are a number of features on this plugin that you can use such as social sharing, follow and unfollow, analytics, post scheduling, and more. These features will definitely help with your social media marketing. Social Warfare also comes with plenty of templates which should allow you to create the content necessary for each platform.”
Jon Torres recommends Social Snap, “If you have a membership site as I do, its social login tool helps visitors log in to the site with their social media credentials. Plus, I like how it makes it easy to customize social media posts to look however best you envision. That’s great for branding and encouraging clicks. And, I love that I can recover share counts if something affects my domain or permalinks and the social proof poofs away.
Social Snap also works seamlessly on multiple devices. Ultimately, it does the good stuff; supports over 30 popular platforms, social sharing (including click to tweet), reviving old posts, auto-posting, and displaying share counters for social proof. Oh, the social buttons are not just pretty. You can animate, pick different colors, custom-label, and place them virtually anywhere, too–all to maximize social shares. It’s not cheap at $39-$99/month, but it’s worth it.”
“If you’re looking for a robust social media plugin for your WordPress site, be sure to check out Shared Counts,” says Jacques Buffet of Zety. ”It’s a quick and easy-to-use plugin that counts your social media shares from such platforms as Google+, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Stumbleupon, Pinterest, and Yummly.
What’s also great about Shared Counts is that it offers multiple button styles as well as different placement options on the site: before or after the content or manually if you really want to dial it in.”
Andre Oentoro of Milkwhale adds, “Shared Counts is a user-friendly social media plugin for WordPress and comes with share buttons for the most popular social networks such as Twitter, Google, Linkedin, Pinterest, and Facebook to name a few. With these essentials, I think Shared Counts is a great plugin to encourage content sharing.”
“This plugin is easy to use, especially for WordPress beginners,” says Natasha Rei of Explainerd. “Sassy Social Share offers full support for many social media websites, and it counts the social shares too. If you’re rookies, having clear toolbar buttons allows you to make a gesture easily.”
“I used to have another social media WordPress plugin before using the Scriptless Social Sharing plugin,” says Jonathan Sanchez of Parent Portfolio. “When the other plugin updated, my social sharing buttons disappeared. I had to revert to a previous release of that plugin temporarily. With Scriptless Social Sharing, I never had that problem. It’s not a fancy plugin, but it gets the job done! It doesn’t involve any Javascript, which can impact a site’s performance.”
“Most of the social media plugins do the same thing, so what I am really interested in is customer service and Shareaholic has had, by far, the most responsive and helpful customer service I experienced,” says Bryce Welker of CPA Exam Guy.
“I recommend Ultimate Social Media,” says Janice Wald of Mostly Blogging. “I tried other social media plugins with poor experiences. For instance, I would get fatal errors. Now, I use Ultimate Social Media and I haven’t had a problem. Also, you can move the social share buttons horizontal, vertical, and have them float. You have many choices for social media sites such as the ability to share your posts to Instagram that I haven’t seen with other social share buttons. Also, the plugin is free.”
“If you’re writing great content, you want to make it easy for your audience to share it,” says Ashley Cummings. “The best way to do this is to add social share buttons to the end or side of your blog post. You can accomplish this easily by using one of the many social share WordPress plugins. I like Social Share Icons.”
If you are looking for a way to auto-publish new posts to social media, the Blog2Social plugin might be a good fit.
“Blog2Social is super easy to set up and use,” says Kassandra Marsh of Lakazdi. “After installing the plugin, you connect all your accounts. It’s able to connect to many platforms including Facebook, LinkedIn, Medium and Pinterest. Then whenever you publish a blog post, the plug in appears near to the publish button inside WordPress. The paid version will automatically share the post, free version you’ll have to do it manually.”
If you use Buffer for social media scheduling and management, then this plugin is a must-have.
“Buffer is a tool that allows you to schedule all of your social media content in one location,” says Brian Stewart of ProsperoWeb, LLC. “For busy entrepreneurs, this can be a massive time saver. Buffer is compatible with all website platforms. It enables you to schedule social media posts directly from your blog, draft unique messages, and schedule multiple posts at the same time.”
Sanket Shah of InVideo adds, “All you have to do is create an account on the buffer and connect it with all your social media platforms and then download the WP to Buffer plugin in WordPress and you are good to go. Now you can easily schedule your social media post using Buffer.”
The SNAP plugin might be a good fit for a time-crunched small business owner.
“We all want to engage with customers and potential customers on social media but it can sometimes be a struggle for small businesses to find the time to dedicate to fully managing their social media accounts,” says Michelle Symonds of Ditto Digital. “Businesses also want their web content, such as blog posts, to work harder at informing and engaging visitors. The answer to both of these issues can be found in the NextScripts Social Networks Auto-Poster (SNAP) plugin for WordPress. The format of the auto-posts is fully customisable and, better still, they are fully white-labelled so there is nothing to tell your readers that any particular posts on you social networks were automatically generated.
At Ditto Digital we use SNAP on our own WordPress website and recommend it to clients who do not have a full-time, in-house social media manager. There is a free version or an inexpensive pro version that will enable you to set up auto-posting to pretty much any social account you can think of, including the usual Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube etc. Once configured, every time you publish a new WordPress blog post a formatted post with a backlink will be published to all of your social networks.”
This plugin is a little different than others since you can use it to repurpose and extend the shelf life of old posts.
“This plugin will cycle through any blog posts you choose at whatever interval you choose so that you always have content for social media,” says Eva Keller of Discovering Hidden Gems. “I personally have mine set to cycle through all of my blog posts by posting to Facebook and Twitter every 24 hours. It also posts my new blog posts on those social media channels when they go live.”
Alex Birkett of Blissfully adds, “If you have a lot of blog content and not a lot of time, Revive Old Posts squeezes out additional ROI from your efforts. It’s the simplest possible plugin. “It just takes your old content and shares it from a Twitter account of your choosing periodically. I’d wager that most companies can’t and won’t build up a massive channel on Twitter, but you can still tap into additional traction and traffic by sharing content.
However, the cost/benefit tradeoff is often not worth it due to how much time it takes to engage on social channels. Revive Old Posts makes it easy for busy teams to get additional leverage by automating social sharing.”
For example, Sherry Morgan of Petsolino says, “This plugin is a real life-saver! It will let you set up different social media accounts like Twitter, Facebook,LinkedIn, etc. and will send out all of your archived posts on each one of them. Once you have set up the plugin, the free version will go through the categories that you’ve included. Then pick individual posts and tweet them for you with the link and a bunch of tags.
This is a great way to program my Twitter account and other social media networks to work smarter and not harder. It can tweet or post at whatever interval you set. Just take note that the free versions will only let you post every 8 hours.
Drawbacks to note:
It’s a bit overstuffed, Revive Old Post is the biggest hog in my plugins. But it’s so worth it so it’s okay.”
If you have a strong Instagram presence, this plugin is a great way to integrate your IG feed on your site.
“Showing Instagram photos on your website is a great way to showcase your projects and work if your career involves lots of visual work,” says Jessica Rhoades of Create IT Web Designs. “It makes it easy to showcase your latest projects and portfolio. Because, let’s be honest, it’s tough keeping your portfolio up to date on your website. The Instagram Feed by Smash Balloon Integrates into your WordPress website by shortcode. It allows for one or multiple rows of your Instagram feed. The many options allow you to showcase the feed how you would like.”
Buddypress is one of the most unique plugins on our list since you can use it to build your own mini social-media site right within WordPress.
Krishna Rungta of Guru99 says, “I would recommend the Buddypress plugin. It is one of the most famous plugins that convert your site into a social media website. It has built-in features for groups, activity streams (more like a Facebook wall), forums, community page. But it works on a Buddypress theme and also some basic themes like twenty-ten. There is also WP Symposium which is new and not many developers. Then there is Facestream, which will provide Facebook integration and Twitter stream.”
Related: The 10 Best WordPress SEO Plugins for Improving Your On-Page SEO
From social share buttons to auto-publishing, these 18 plugins can help you improve your social media strategy. Many of these plugins can also make your team more efficient.
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Jessica Malnik is a content strategist and copywriter for SaaS and productized service businesses. Her writing has appeared on The Next Web, Social Media Examiner, SEMRush, CMX, Help Scout, Convince & Convert, and many other sites.
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