The Top Social Media Plugins for WordPress

The Top Social Media Plugins for WordPress

Social media plugins are essential when you run a blog or website through WordPress. When building traffic is a major aim of many marketing plans, easily connecting your audience with social media via share buttons is essential, as is understanding the metrics behind those social media shares. Connect your blog to social media with the top WordPress plugins. Though they offer similar features at first glance, each of the top plugins has extras and customization options to set them apart.

Sumo

This plugin is a combination of apps designed for traffic growth. Add social media sharing buttons through Sumo’s “Share” app. Sumo offers a lot of options for adding your buttons, including tons of placements on your page. If you’re not very savvy with using plugins and apps, Sumo is great. The interface is very user-friendly and, to add the buttons to your page, you simply click where you’d like them to go. Do this for your mobile site, too.

Sumo tells you which social media networks are giving you the most shares, so you can choose which buttons to display to maximize your traffic. Though Sumo is available in HTML for any blog, the WordPress plugin is the easiest way to use this app suite.

Easy Social Share Buttons for WordPress

The Easy Social Share Buttons for WordPress plugin offers easy sharing solutions for bloggers. This plugin is $19, and it offers you social media share buttons for your blog. The concept is simple, but the execution is extremely customizable. You get more than 45 possible buttons for social media sharing and bookmarking, and tons of placement and design options.

Image via Flickr by Shahid Abdullah

Built-in templates help you customize your buttons quickly. You can add pop-up and fly-in prompts to encourage people to share your posts on their social pages. The app provides counters, customizable text, and the capability to conduct an A/B test on two different sets of buttons if you wish. Social metrics come built in, too.

Monarch

Monarch is a simple way to show a floating bar for share buttons. To get Monarch, you need Elegant Themes on WordPress. Get a developer license for the themes package, and you’ll get access to Monarch, almost 100 WordPress themes, and a few other plugin options, too.

With Monarch, choose the popular floating bar option, do a pop-up, or display the buttons both above and below your content. One of Monarch’s strength is how elegant it looks, especially when matched with one of the Elegant Themes blog templates. If you have money to spend on your social media plugins, Elegant Themes with Monarch is a great choice.

Social Warfare

Like the other notable plugins, Social Warfare offers myriad options for placing and floating share buttons on your page. The plugin tracks your most popular posts based on shares and creates a widget featuring those posts. A major advantage to Social Warfare is how easily it integrates with Pinterest shares. For a visual blog with lots of images, that Pinterest connection is key when gaining and keeping followers.

With Social Warfare, you can create images that look great on Pinterest. These images don’t interact with other images you might have in the blog post or on your website, either.

Social Warfare connects well with Twitter, too. Create boxes within your posts for “tweetable” quotations. You can customize how these boxes look, and encourage your readers to share good quotes with very little effort on their part. If you don’t get a lot of shares, you can hide that fact by not displaying any share counters.

EA Share Count

Some bloggers signed up with WordPress because the building blocks for a great website are already there. If you gravitate towards plugins and layouts that require very little from you, EA Share Count is a social media plugin you’ll want to look into.

EA Share Count offers buttons for only the most popular social media sites. That eliminates a lot of headache for you because you don’t have to sit there wondering what you should include. Choose between just a few button styles, and choose where you want those buttons to go. A few manual options exist for extra customization, but you can ignore those if you’re looking for quick and easy.

MashShare

When you employ a clean look on your blog or site, MashShare is the plugin you want to use. Too much clutter with social media buttons and metrics is unattractive and might annoy or fluster blog readers, especially readers from older generations. More than 70,000 websites use MashShare, so you’re in good company when you choose this plugin.

A simple interface that mimics Mashable’s share buttons for Facebook and Twitter. If your share counts are below a certain number, hide that fact in the settings. Customization options allow you to display the buttons in different configurations, often emphasizing which social media platform has the most shares. Share counts are animated and obvious to grab reader attention and encourage more shares.

Custom Share Buttons

Get a customizable array of social media share buttons without a lot of extras to wade through. Choose the share buttons you want to include on your site and decide where you would like those buttons to go. Custom Share Buttons offers simple tile icons for the most popular social media sites, and you’ll have these up and running on your blog in very little time.

Custom Share Buttons is a good choice for someone who has metrics analysis software already running. You don’t need to pay for plugins that offer traffic counts and other information if you’re getting it elsewhere. Add these buttons and monitor whether you see a change in your traffic and share counts.

Choose which plugin suits your blog or site best with some analysis. Determine which features will be most useful to you. Are you looking for a simple button solution or some in-depth metrics? If you have a strict budget, start with the free plugins, then graduate to more expensive options if you need to. Don’t let your blog go another day without share buttons and that essential social media connection.