Social media is a crucial component for any online marketing strategy. If you’re running your small business website on the WordPress platform, it’s incredibly easy to integrate social. There are hundreds of ready made social media plugins for WordPress to choose from.
Your choice of social media plugins for your WordPress website will depend on which social platforms you use actively, what kind of content you offer on your site, and the best look and placement of social tools that complements your website design. From simple to richly featured, below are some of the best WordPress plugins for social media.
Social Media Plugins for WordPress
Digg Digg
This versatile plugin by Buffer comes with plenty of customization options and integrates with virtually any social media platform. With Digg Digg, you can create either a floating social media bar with left or right scrolling options, or sharing buttons that automatically populate at the top or bottom of each of your blog posts.
Digg Digg can be used with Twitter, Facebook, Buffer, Google+, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Reddit, Tumblr – just about any social channels you might use. Facebook options include both Like and Share, and “lazy loading” helps you cut down on load times for your website.
Flare
Simple and eye-catching, the Flare plugin not only gives you customizable share buttons, but also lets you create and display a Follow Me widget, so your visitors can one-click follow your social media channels right from your website.
The plugin is compatible with major social media platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Google+ and more. You can customize the appearance of the buttons, and place the share bar at the top or bottom of posts, or to the left and right of your pages. The left and right options scroll down the page with viewers, and auto-hide when not in use.
ShareThis
With great customization, tons of features, and more than 120 supported social media platforms, ShareThis is one of the popular social media plugins for WordPress that’s been downloaded more than 1.5 million times. This plugin tool offers more than social buttons, which come in the form of a Hovering Bar that can be displayed on the right or left side of your pages, with counters and your choice of small or large buttons.
In addition, ShareThis has built-in social analytics, a CopyNShare widget that helps you track shares when your content is copied and pasted, and more.
Share Buttons by AddThis
One of the most popular and recognizable social media plugins for WordPress, AddThis Share Buttons let you integrate with more than 330 social platforms and bookmarking sites, as well as email sharing. While there isn’t an option for a floating sidebar, the plugin gives you plenty of layout choices – and you can also get free analytics when you create an AddThis account.
Floating Social Media Icon
Highly rated and popular, the Floating Social Media Icon plugin gives you a customizable, configurable social bar that flies onto the screen and scrolls along with visitors. You can also disable floating and set up static icons with this plugin.
Floating Social Media Icon gives you more than 20 different icon styles to choose from, so you can match the themes and styles of your website. It also supports multiple widgets, so you can display various social media buttons separately on your pages.
Social Media Feather
Lightweight yet powerful, Social Media Feather is a simple, high-performing social plugin that keeps speeds up and load times down by not using JavaScript. The buttons have a clean, modern look, and you can customize the appearance with social icons skins.
This plugin supports shortcodes, and is currently the only social sharing plugin that supports Retina and high-resolution displays used by mobile devices like the iPad 5.
Slick Social Sharing Buttons
If you’re looking for a social media plugin for WordPress that’s easy to implement and comes with plenty of options, try Slick Social Sharing Buttons. This plugin lets you customize button types, specify which pages and posts to display social sharing on, and choose from either a floating or slide-out share bar. You can also customize location, direction, floating speed, animation speed and more.
Slick Social Sharing Buttons supports shortcodes, and gives you a social analytics dashboard to help you track your sharing activity.
Social Media Widget
With a long list of supported social platforms, including email and RSS, and some fun and interesting customizations, Social Media Widget is an easy-to-use plugin that creates a sidebar widget for social sharing, with links that open a separate tab or window when clicked.
Social Media Widget offers three icon sizes, four icon styles (Web 2.0, Sketch, Heart and Cutout), and four animation types to make your social media buttons stand out on the page.
Shareaholic
The feature-rich, powerful Shareaholic offers more than social sharing. With a stated aim to help you get readers to “actually discover and submit your articles to numerous social bookmarking sites,” this plugin supports Facebook (both Like and Send), Google+, Pinterest, Twitter, LinkedIn and other major social platforms, with share counters for many of them.
In addition, Shareaholic comes with Classic Bookmarks, a Recommendations & Related Content tool, built-in Social Analytics, and official support for Google’s URL shortener as well as Google Analytics.
Share Buttons by AddToAny
Offering support for more than 100 social sites in 19 languages, AddToAny Share Buttons is one of the most popular social media plugins for WordPress with almost 3 million downloads. It’s easy to customize and fully featured, and supports both shares and interactive clicks – including Facebook Likes, a Tweet button for Twitter, a “Pin It” button for Pinterest, a +1 button for Google+ and more.
Bookmarking and email buttons integrate with the most popular email services (Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, Outlook / Hotmail, AOL, and nearly every Web-based or desktop email program).
You can customize the appearance and position of the AddToAny share bar, and integrate with Google Analytics to make the most of your social marketing.
BONUS: Microblog Poster
A different kind of social plugin, Microblog Poster lets you automatically push your WordPress blog content to various social media platforms. This plugin currently supports Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, LinkedIn, Delicious and more. It also supports shortcodes and multiple accounts on the same platform.
Use this social media calendar template to create a social media publishing schedule!
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