Remember when everyone would say, “There’s an app for that”? It’s becoming increasingly likely that there’s a WordPress plugin for that, too. In fact, the more involved your WordPress-based website becomes, the more important all those plugins can be to your competitiveness.
In terms of social media plugins, they exist aplenty, but not all are created equal. We’ve scoured through some of our favorites and narrowed them down to the following eight. Each of them offers specific insights, allowing you to grow your following on a variety of social platforms. As we’ve come to realize after evaluating stats related to social media upticks and site performance, an increase in followers can significantly affect a website’s presence.
Jetpack’s default social sharing capabilities are a great start, but to really supercharge your WordPress blog’s social presence, try some of these:
As you’ve no doubt learned, most visitors need to be led to take any kind of action. This plugin is a basic call to action, showing them the widgets that will link to the site’s social media accounts so they can follow the site’s authors. It’s not a fancy plug-in by any means, but it effectively gets the job done.
This WordPress plugin allows your readers to share what they see. From blog posts to news items to images, all they have to do is click on the appropriate button and share on a wide variety of social media sites. These include the biggies like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Instagram. Basically, if you can think of a social media platform, the button link will probably be available in this plugin.
Mashshare echoes the types of social share buttons you’ll find at Mashable. These visuals are familiar to visitors and may make your website seem more connected with other popular social media channels across the web. The plugin also allows you to have control on the back end, choosing how many social media widgets you want to offer and display per page.
Unlike the other plugins mentioned thus far, this one has a price tag of $14 attached to it. Don’t let that frighten you away or keep you from considering it, though. It’s a premium plugin that gives you tons of options. One huge bonus is you can even hide social share counts if they look too low. For instance, if a blog post has zero Twitter shares and one Google+ share, you probably don’t want to advertise that to the world.
This is WordPress’s official Facebook plugin, and it’s being widely used by businesses representing a number of verticals. When someone comments at your site and they have a Facebook account, their comment will show on their Facebook timeline. This gives you additional reach, especially if their Facebook friends are intrigued by the commentary.
Have some content that’s old but still relevant to your readers? Use this plugin to reshare the content and give it new life. Although this is a free plugin, there’s a premium version available. For a little extra money, you get the benefit of being able to not only plan when old content is going to be refreshed and available but to also create custom and global messages to go along with the old posts. This avoids the dullness of duplicity and encourages clicks, shares and likes.
With Click to Tweet, you can customize the tweets that are shared by your readers. Pick a great pullquote from a post or create an enticing headline that’s not part of the original story. You’re in total control of what others see, and it’s a powerful tool that enables you to do marketing A/B split tests, if desired.
Have something particularly important to share but don’t want to give it away for free? This plugin, priced currently at $24, creates a lock so your visitors can’t view the entire post unless they share it. Use Social Locker for juicy tidbits, sales info and hard-hitting items. Keep this in mind, though: If you don’t already have a following, you may want to use Social Locker quite sparingly for maximum benefits.
Ready to get plugging? Download your favorite social media plugin now and watch your website stats seriously soar in the coming months.
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