2020 just started and the impact of social media continues to rise. It’s time we plan for the future and keep ourselves a step ahead of others. As I said, with the reach and impact of social media growing at an unparalleled pace, it is essential for bloggers to reach out to their followers as well.
Integrating social sharing buttons on their blogs. By incorporating social bookmarking and sharing buttons, you will give your readers the ability to quickly share your blog posts on their favorite social networking sites. Doing so will help you drive more traffic from social media sites which will, in turn, also help improve your search engine ranking.
Now, there are many WordPress social media plugins out there, but I have listed below the best plugins for you to start using today.
NovaShare
Novashare is a newly released social sharing plugin. Novashare only adds 6 KB and 2 requests to the front end of your site. Novashare, unlike other social share plugins, uses inline SVG icons instead of third-party icons which means there are no additional libraries or DNS lookups needed just for the icons. There count refresh rate options uses a staggered approach, which is the best for performance because it keeps API calls down. This makes it even faster!
Here are notable features of Novashare:
ClickToTweet feature
UTM tagging feature
Pinterest Pin images feature
Novashare is developed in native WordPress style, and is newbie friendly. You can literally configure this plugin within seconds. They also have, “Share Count Recovery feature”. This feature can combine your previous domain and your current domain’s social share counts which is helpful after domain migration. Novashare share buttons are optimized for both desktop and mobile. You can also set breakpoints so that when the browser’s viewport is above or below the breakpoint, social share buttons hide. The follow widget feature helps you get new social media followers. So, if you ask me… this is it. A modern, super fast, lightweight, and easy to use social media share WordPress plugin.
Social Snap
Social Snap is a powerhouse of a social sharing plugin, and it does much more than just adding social sharing icons. It supports over 30 of the most popular social networks and lets you place the sharing buttons in a variety of places for optimal results. It even lets you place sharing buttons with a shortcode, which is a rare feature.
You also have complete control over the design of the buttons. You can choose a shape, size, choose from unlimited colour options, labels, and even add a little animation to the buttons, which is pretty amazing and eye-catching.
Social Snap accurately tracks the number of shares for all networks using APIs and clicks, and you can even preserve your share count if you change your URL—which is very important. There are many other important features, and the developers even have some addons to the plugin (available on some plans), which will help you auto post on social media, revive your old posts, and lock your content and force users to share it.
Social Warfare plugin
The Social Warfare plugin comes in 2 versions, the free version and the Pro version. The free version has all the basic features that you would need to setup social sharing on your website. But if you’re serious about social sharing, then you should opt for the pro version, which is not that expensive considering its value.
The free version lets you pick from the most popular social networks, and offers 4 different placements for the buttons, including floating bars. The sharing counts are pulled in with the API, and you can also change some open-graph data to customize the look of the shared post. Read my review of Socialwarfare to learn more about this plugin.
The Pro version supports additional networks, adds a pin-it button on your images, gives you full control over open-graph tags, and many other important features.
Easy Social Share Plugin
f you are looking for an alternative to the Social Warfare plugin, Easy Social Share is a perfect solution for you. Despite being a premium plugin, it costs only $22, and you can install in on multiple websites. Recently, they released the 7.2 version of Easy Social Share plugin with many cutting-edge features. This plugin is used by over 300,000 websites and is still one of the highest rated plugins in the Codecanyon repo.
This plugin offers many advanced features such as A/B testing your social media buttons placement & you can trigger social sharing buttons to show based on user action. That could be after commenting or when user is about to click the exit button.
