Best Social Media Plugins for WordPress
July 24. 2020
For better or worse, social media has become an inescapable part of our everyday lives. Every single day, countless people spend at least a couple of hours on their social media networks. To businesses both big and small, what this translates to is easy customer outreach with even a small amount of paid marketing. Even if you happen to provide an offline service (or “real world”, as it were), it’s unwise to ignore the boon of social media networks. Failing to tap into the potentially enormous online customer base can easily lead to a counter-effect and make you lose business. Luckily for you, promoting your website is made ludicrously easy with some of the best social media plugins for WordPress available today. Here we will cover some of our top choices.
Different criteria that make the best social media plugins for WordPress
WordPress plugins for social media are handy little tools for website promotion. Some even take it a step further and enable you to integrate the functionality of social media directly to your site. However, integrating social media effectively is about a whole lot more than simply placing “share” buttons at the somewhere in your web pages. It’s about the exact place where you put them, but also about the plugin itself – how much quality it has and whether or not it might overload your website, thus slowing it down. The plugins we’ll outline for you have been tried and tested by a lot of users and have received positive reviews. The plugin design also makes a huge impact, so our picks come with a great user interface. Just be careful not to go overboard with plugins, it can get out of hand easily.
A brief word about social media networks
Before we go into our list of top social media plugins on WordPress, it’s worth taking a brief look at the most popular social media platforms (as of 2020). We’ll also provide some numbers regarding their user base. This might give you an idea of possible following you can garner:
- Facebook – the undisputed giant of social media today; despite the recent security and political outrages that caused the younger members to turn away from it, Facebook is still going strong with over 2.5 billion users monthly
- Instagram – An image/photography sharing platform that has surpassed the 1 billion monthly users; in some aspects it stands to overtake Facebook
- YouTube – the most popular platform for video sharing and video content creation with over 2 billion monthly users
- Twitter – the giant that’s managed to gain popularity by reducing information to tiny, bite-sized chunks; although somewhat less popular (roughly 300 million), its members are active and engaged multiple times a day
- TikTok – the youngest of the bunch, but with over 800 million users monthly, it’s slowly taking the world by storm; the short, entertaining video format on this platform makes it very appealing to young people
- LinkedIn – sporting around 600-700 monthly users, this platform can best be described as “Facebook, but with jobs”; the wide range of formats that you can use to share content makes it a great choice
The general popularity of the platform is not indicative of much, however. Any social media platform can be an effective way to gain traction for your website if you know how to use it properly. That being said, you must still make an informed decision on which platform you’ll be using to spread your content.
Monarch Social Sharing is one of the must-have social media plugins for WordPress
Created by ElegantThemes, Monarch is a WordPress social media plugin that you absolutely must get. It’s able to display over twenty social sharing networks on your site that you can add and remove as you choose. As we previously noted, where you place your “share” buttons is extremely important. To more effectively promote yourself on social media, Monarch offers a fully customizable placement of the social sharing buttons.
On top of this, Monarch also provides you the option to share images. This is an absolutely amazing perk. Well-placed images make for great content and can have a huge impact on your social media campaign. Until recently, you had to find a different WordPress plugin just so you could share images and other media on social platforms. But now, Monarch is able to accommodate you.
Revive Old Posts is a WordPress social media plugin that will grow your presence
It’s a well-established fact that an active social media account is an account that grows and attracts traffic. If you’re inactive and don’t share content at all, your account will stagnate. For this reason, many businesses use plugins to share older blog posts on their social media networks. However, manually picking out which old posts to share can be a tedious process. This is where Revive Old Posts shines! It’s a social media plugin for WordPress that enables you to easily put older blog posts on a rotation. This, in turn, allows you to constantly draw traffic to your older blog posts. You can even create a schedule for the plugin to share your content at specific times, and add hashtags as well. The best part is that it saves you a lot of hassle, while also providing you with full control.
Kiwi Social Sharing is lightweight and won’t overload your website
Kiwi Social Sharing is easy to grasp. It puts all the options to captivate your users at your disposal. You can set it up swiftly and start increasing your traffic on all social media platforms – Kiwi supports all the leading ones. Kiwi Social Sharing stands out among other social media plugins for WordPress because of how simple yet effective it is. Loading times on your websites will never suffer because of it, you’ll be able to maintain optimum speeds. In terms of sharing buttons, there are multiple options you can choose from. You can place them above your content, below it, or use floating icons. All of this is designed to easily grab your visitors’ attention. And it has both free and premium versions!
There will be honorable mentions, but you can’t go wrong with your choice
We have presented our top three picks of social media plugins for WordPress mainly based on how unique they are. This leaves some room to mention a few that are noteworthy. Social Warfare, SocialFans, ARSocial, and Maria to name a few. They’re definitely worth taking a look at. What’s important is that they’re functional, and this is what you need from a plugin. Picking a plugin mainly comes down to taste, they all serve a similar purpose and they’ll get the job done.