With such huge potential in mind, almost every single website has added social media sharing buttons on their pages. Users can now share everything: from a silly cat video they watched on Youtube or an article they read on Reuters. The traffic generated through social media sharing comes second only to search engine traffic. You too can leverage the power of social media by incorporating sharing buttons on your WordPress site. It’s a simple matter of using a social media sharing plugin.
To help you choose, here is a list of our 10 favorite social sharing plugins.
Author Bio: Tracey Jones is a professional web developer who currently works with HireWPGeeks, a renowned online portal where you can hire WordPress developer in order to customize your WordPress site. She also happens to be a blogger with a strong passion for writing excellent stuffs related to web technologies in her free time.
This simple, lightweight plugin is easy to use and looks cool. It allows you to add social sharing and following features to all of your posts, pages, and custom post types. It’s also one of the few plugins that’s Retina-ready and compatible with high-res displays.
Social Media Feather has integrated social sharing buttons from all of the most popular platforms: Facebook, Google+, Twitter, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Pinterest, and email. The follow features are available for Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest, Vimeo, and RSS.
It looks great and can be customized with further add-ons. It doesn’t use JavaScript and doesn’t affect your site’s loading time or overall performance at all. It’s available to all for free.
A premium plugin which is really quite smart, Monarch by Elegant Themes is simple and stunning.
It supports all popular social networks. It allows you to display your share count (for all platforms) after they reach a certain number (proving to your users how awesome your blog/site is). It has a beautiful interface. There are several creative placement options you can utilize (like pop-ups and fly-ins which appear on triggers). You can choose to display your share buttons through widget or shortcode.
The plugin will also show social media statistics for you to analyze.
At $89/year it might seem a bit over-priced at a glance. However, you can cancel your subscription whenever you want and get access to other premium Elegant Themes plugins and themes.
This is another premium social sharing plugin. And it’s armed-to-the-teeth with goodies.
It allows you access to quite a variety of placement options. Its visual design can be customized and you’ll be hard-pressed to not find something you like from 22 built-in templates and customizable button text. It supports sharing and following for more than 35 social media platforms (including WhatsApp).
You can manually place the buttons on your site/page. Like Monarch, you can set the share counts to be displayed after they are high enough for your liking.
There are pop-ups and fly-ins you can use to encourage social sharing. The plugin is optimized for mobile display and is compatible with e-commerce and download plugins.
The previous version had some performance issues which have been mostly fixed. At $14, Easy Social Share Buttons is worth a shot.
Oh NOW we’re talking.
SumoMe is not so much a plugin, more like a suite of apps created specifically to help your site traffic grow. While the apps can be used with all HTML compatible sites, it also has a nifty plugin for WordPress.
There is an Image Sharer app, which adds share buttons at the top of your images (supports Pinterest, Facebook, and Twitter). It will also shorten URLs and provide statistics. It can be enabled on all or select pages.
The Share app is the cream of the crop. You get page level targeting, a wide array of buttons of a whole load of social platforms, and more. There’s also the feature that changes the order of social sharing buttons based on the platform that’s most used for sharing your content, on every page.
You can choose one or both of the apps and use it with another plugin. You also need to register. The plugin and additional apps are free, with paid options to remove branding.
SumoMe really packs quite a punch!
You can guess what this plugin does just by looking at the name. Floating Social Bar adds a horizontal social bar (that floats!) to your site’s pages. It’s small, slim, and free.
This lightweight plugin is easy to set up, configure, and use. It has a nice drag-and-drop interface for selecting enabled social services (and their buttons). You can change the text that appears before the buttons and place them where you want. You can select time interval between stats updates.
The plugin apparently believes in transparency, so if you want to hide your stats until they’re good enough to show, this plugin won’t allow you to do that.
Floating Social Bar doesn’t affect your loading time. The scripts of social media services only load when the user hovers over them.
It’s pretty basic, but it does what it says and does it well. For those who can do without showy-flashy features, this plugin is ideal.
Another blunt, straightforward plugin which doesn’t beat around the bush, Simple Share Buttons Adder allows you to add basic social sharing buttons to your pages.
The plugin allows you to: customize number of buttons, their locations, and placement (core settings); edit and customize share text and button appearance (styling), and enable share counts. This is also one of the few plugins which allows use of custom CSS for complete button customization.
This plugin is lightweight and free. A mobile responsive version of this plugin, called Simple Share Buttons Plus, is available for $10.
“Your WordPress, streamlined.” – Jetpack intro page on WP Plugin Directory
With a round nine million downloads tracked on this plugin, odds are astronomical that you’re already using it. And for good reason; Jetpack practically defines ‘versatile’.
For the purpose of this article we are going to stick to Jetpack’s sharing module.
The plugin allows you to take your pick from ten major social media services, not including print and email buttons. Button style and locations can be chosen from a list and sharing label can be edited.
If you want a radically different looking set of sharing buttons, you will have to modify your theme’s ‘style.css’.
There’s a slight flaw which some may find unbearable. Jetpack has been known to slow down loading times.
It’s not just us. More than 100,000 active users and 1 million+ downloads say the same: Shareaholic’s social sharing buttons are amazing.
But it’s so much more than a sharing plugin.
It allows you to disable/enable share count display, supports shortcodes and social analytics, and supports Tumblr, Drupal, Shopify, and more. It will also display ‘related content’ at the end of your posts. You need to register on Shareaholic (for free) to access more features.
The one downside with this plugin comes with an advertisement that shows up sometimes after the user shares your content.
This crafty plugin won’t just enable sharing, it will boost it.
Social Share & Locker Pro has all the basics covered: attractive buttons, great placement options, shortcode support, customizable button text, share counts display, and more. But this is where the similarities with every other plugin end.
This plugin has a built-in content locker, which will offer bonus (read: exclusive) content in exchange for a share. Can you say positive reinforcement?
The plugin is fully responsive and Retina-ready, so that’s another huge plus. It’s also compatible with WooCommerce, BuddyPress, and JigoShop.
It comes with special themes for content-locker pop-up and boasts every feature you could possibly want from a sharing plugin.
At $14, that’s a catch.
(Link: http://codecanyon.net/item/social-share-locker-pro-wordpress-plugin/8137709/?ref=bloggingwizard)
This plugin takes care of the little details. It also takes social media seriously.
Support for all popular social networks, visually gorgeous buttons, share counts display, and variety of placement options aside, this plugin also gives you: custom tweets, tweetable quote boxes, stunning themes, floating buttons, and more. It’s fully mobile responsive.
Social Warfare is also perhaps the only one of its kind that allows you to upload images and post descriptions designed specifically for the crowd at Pinterest, without changing your regular featured images at all.
And if you somehow still have doubts, Social Warfare will show you exactly how efficient it is by tracking UTM code.
Grab it for $24/year subscription that can be cancelled. But we don’t think you’d want to. There’s nothing this plugin won’t do.