Do you want to drive more traffic to your site from social media? With the right set of social media plugins on your WordPress site, you can get your content seen by a wider audience and increase the social media traffic to your site. Considering people spend an average of 2 hours and 22 minutes a day using social media, it would be a huge missed opportunity to ignore this traffic source.
Plus, adding social media plugins to your site is a great way to boost engagement with your existing site visitors too!
There are so many different social media plugins to choose from that it can be overwhelming for anyone trying to choose the best one. So, here are the top 8 social media plugins you can install on your WordPress site right away.
Some of the plugins on this list are free, while others are freemium plugins (free to start, with an option to pay for more features). There are also some premium social media plugins with tons of built-in advanced features. Each one has pros and cons, so take a look at this list and decide which social media plugins are the best options for your website.
Ready? Let’s dive in!
1. Smash Balloon
Smash Balloon is a fully-featured social media plugin that enables you to display social media feeds on your WordPress site without writing any code. You can display multiple feeds on your WordPress site, including Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook Groups. Plus, Smash Balloon offers over a dozen feed layouts.
The Feeds are also easily customizable so that you can curate your feed to match your brand even more. Show off a regular timeline feed or get fancy by displaying photos and videos. You can even display likes, shares, and comments to show social proof on your site.
Smash Balloon is very SEO-friendly and loads your feeds blazingly fast. Get the plugin for the specific social network you need starting at $98 or get all the social media plugins for $598.
2. Shared Counts
Shared Counts is a fast and easy-to-use social media plugin. You can use it to display social share buttons for all the major social media networks, such as Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and more.
You can choose from multiple button styles for the icons and you can also select their display location on your WordPress site. It even lets people email your posts directly to their community, which not many plugins let you do (at least not for free).
When placed on posts, you can set up Shared Counts to display the total share count or the shares for each network individually. By displaying share counts, you can show readers just how popular your posts are.
3. Swifty Bar
Swifty Bar is a slightly different social media plugin for WordPress sites. It displays a sticky bar at the footer of your posts, showing a variety of information about the content, including social media sharing icons for the most popular social networks, a progress bar, and more.
It follows readers as they scroll through the post, increasing their chances of sharing the post with their online network. It looks good on mobile devices, and you can customize the way the bar looks to better match your site branding.
4. Sassy Social Share
Sassy Social Share is an easy-to-use plugin that lets you display social sharing buttons, share counts, and social media icons to redirect users to your social media pages. It comes with three basic styles for icons including rounded, square, or rectangle. You can also choose where to display the icons on your site, like in a floating sidebar, for example.
It currently supports around 100 social media networks and bookmarking sites, with more being added all the time.
The plugin is mobile responsive and was designed to be lightweight and optimized for high-speed page loading. Their support team is also fast to respond and help out, which is nice for a free plugin.
5. AddToAny
Around since 2006, AddToAny is a fully-featured social share button plugin that has built-in support for all the major social networks. Use it to create follow buttons and icons for your business and display them anywhere on your site through the AddToAny widget or by enabling the option in the plugin’s settings (like the floating bar option).
It’s a lightweight plugin that loads quickly. You can display sharing counts, customize the icons to your branding, and even integrate it with your Google Analytics account to track your social media traffic.
6. Better Click to Tweet
This plugin integrates inside each post on your site and lets you suggest content or quotes for people to share on Twitter with 1-click. This is a great way to encourage your blog readers to share your content.
Better Click to Tweet lets you add these suggestions to your posts through a simple shortcode while you’re typing, [bctt tweet=”Text of your tweet goes here”]. The plugin automatically links back to your website on Twitter, earning you extra traffic as people come back to read the whole post.
You’ll want to use the shortcode on your best ideas or quotes in the post, as that’ll engage people more than just the headline or title of the post.
7. Simple Social Icons
This plugin does exactly what its name says: it displays follow icons on your site in any area that’s widget-enabled, like your sidebar or footer.
You can add, reorder, and size the icons as you like and customize the colors to match your site’s branding. It’s very easy to use and has a minimum impact on your site’s loading time and other performance measures. This simple plugin can help you grow your following on social media by directing your site visitors to your social media pages.
8. Revive Old Posts
Another interesting plugin is Revive Old Posts, which lets you share previously published posts through your social media accounts. It’s a good way to keep your social media channels active and also introduce people to the content they might’ve missed earlier.
The free version lets you connect Twitter and Facebook, and includes a URL shortener too. The premium one adds eight more channels, including Facebook Groups and LinkedIn Company pages, as well as support for custom post types and a custom sharing schedule. Prices for the premium version range from $75 for a single site to $299 for unlimited sites.
Wrapping up
There you are, the top 8 social media plugins for WordPress websites! Any of these awesome plugins will help you increase your social media traffic, get your content out to a wider audience, and boost engagement. Choose one and get started today!