WordPress is currently the most popular website building platform anywhere on the Internet. The source code is free, there are thousands of great looking and affordable themes available, or you can have your own custom theme designed for your purposes. It has one of the most user-friendly back-ends available, meaning you will not need specific technical or programming knowledge to edit the contents of your website. Simply add or delete text, photos, audio and video files, as you need them.
Besides these characteristics, WordPress is the best website builder if you want to add a blog or an ecommerce section to your main website, facilitating quick and seamless integration. As such a popular, open source platform, (programmers can contribute by adding, improving functionalities, eliminating bugs, etc.), WordPress is the website builder with the largest available choice in terms of plugins as well.
In case you didn’t know, plugins are small pieces of third party code added to a website which offer your users various useful added features, such as weather forecasts, currency exchange rates, tax rate calculators, and so on. One of the most popular categories of WordPress plugins are social media plugins. These help you equip your website with various options to share your blog content on social media, access your social media pages at any moment, or login and comment on your articles, using your social media profiles.
Today we will present to you the top 5 social media plugins for WordPress:
1. Monarch
Monarch is not only one of the greatest looking plugins, but also one of the richest in features, for adding social media buttons to your WordPress website. It is created and available through Elegant Themes. Elegant Themes offers its members access to 87 professionally designed website themes and 5 different social media plugins, in exchange for an annual fee of $89.
By far, Monarch is the best option out there, and makes a firm reason to invest in membership. Among its key features are:
- Five placement options for social media buttons: as a widget, in a sidebar, above photos, as automatic pop-up, or floating;
- Support for the most popular 20 social media platforms, including Facebook™, Twitter, Pinterest and LinkedIn;
- Real-time count and display of your social media following on the website;
- Tracking for social shares of content with built-in statistics;
- User friendly interface.
2. Social Warfare
If you want a less expensive option than Monarch, the Social Warfare plugin is a great choice. For $29 per year, you will get a comprehensive plugin which supports the most popular social media platforms, and offers a wide range of themes and styles to choose from. All of this allows you, the user, to customise the look of the social media buttons to fit in with the design of your website.
Apart from these features, Social Warfare is considered one of the best plugins, encouraging social shares by allowing you to add the Pin It button on all of your website photos, or include Tweetable quote boxes throughout your content, among others. The plugin is designed according to responsive web design principles, offering a great browsing and sharing experience on mobile phones and computers alike.
3. AddThis
This plugin is free and extremely popular among WordPress website owners. It is displayed as a white coloured plus sign or orange background and, upon hovering over it with the mouse button, displays social media platforms in a drop-down menu.
As we said, this plugin is free – for up to 5 different social media platforms. For a $99 fee per year, you can add 5 more platforms, for a maximum of 10 social media profiles (currently allowed by the plugin).
4. Simple Share Buttons Adder
As its name states, this 100% free plugins allows you to insert the basic social media sharing buttons above or below your blog posts, on your website home page, in archived content, and next to excerpts.
At present, the SSBA plugin supports 15 social media platforms, and offers 9 different styles of social media button design to choose from.
5. Shareaholic
This social media plugin is not restricted to WordPress, as it works with other content management systems. It has a catchy design, with red handwritten text signalling the social sharing buttons. After a user has shared your content, a pop-up window will appear with the text “Thank you for sharing!”. With Shareaholic, you can opt to display or hide your share counts, and you benefit support for social media analytics. On top of all this, Shareaholic is completely free to install and use on your website.