If a tree falls in a forest and no one’s around to hear it, did it make a sound? Likewise, if you publish content on your WordPress site and no one views it, was there any point to publishing the content at all?
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WordPress Plugins for Social Media Sharing
Don’t let your posts go unnoticed. There are so many ways to share content today.
Just a decade or two ago, internet users communicated primarily through chatrooms and bulletin board-style forums. The online community was segmented into small groups, divided by hobbies and offline relationships.
But now, there’s Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and a cornucopia of other social media platforms that each bring millions of people together. And this represents an enormous opportunity for WordPress bloggers.
It doesn’t matter whether you’re a passionate artist desperate to share your creative work or a level-headed business manager just looking for a way to make more sales – social media is where you’ll find your audience.
Top 8 Social Media Sharing Plugins
Social media marketing is so valuable that it’s become its own industry. Writers, graphic designers, and online marketing consultants have made careers out of helping businesses improve their social media outreach efforts.
Many businesses spend thousands of dollars per month on these services. Hiring expert help is surely the most effective way to engage with more people on social media.
In the meantime, you can use any of the following plugins to quickly give your social media accounts a boost and attract more traffic to your WordPress site and you don’t have to hire a WordPress developer to do so.
1. Social Media Share Buttons & Social Sharing Icons
It may not have a great name (long and generic is a bad combination), but Social Media Share Buttons & Social Sharing Icons is a great plugin.
The stats speak for themselves: this plugin has over 200,000 active installations and a near-perfect 4.9 out of 5 average rating from 4,000+ reviews.
Social media buttons encourage visitors to share your content with others, and it’s easy to see why Social Media Share Buttons & Social Sharing Icons is so popular in particular.
It’s got everything you need from a plugin like this, including buttons for 200+ social media platforms, 16 button design options, and animation effects.
2. MashShare
MashShare is another social media button plugin, and it has impressive stats as well (70,000+ active downloads, 4.8 out of 5 average rating from 900+ reviews).
One thing that sets MashShare apart is its Smart Share Count feature. The way this works is similar to the practice of “salting” the tip jar – in restaurants, workers will often put some money in their tip jar before the store opens.
When customers see the jar, they get the impression that many people have already left tips that day, and they feel social pressure to leave a tip as well.
MashShare’s Smart Share Count feature allows you to add virtual shares to your content. This leads to more organic shares, as people are more likely to share something that they think is already popular.
3. AddToAny
With 500,000+ active installations, AddToAny is the absolute most popular social media button plugin on WordPress, and it’s been reviewed about as well as Social Media Share Buttons & Social Sharing Icons and MashShare (4.7 out of 5 average rating from 800+ reviews).
The secret to AddToAny’s success is that it’s feature-rich (custom button placement, Google Analytics integration, etc.) while remaining fast and lightweight.
Nothing’s more important than performance. It doesn’t matter how much you like the features of a plugin – if it slows your site down, it will drive visitors away. That’s certainly not a problem with AddToAny.
4. Swifty Bar
Swifty Bar offers a unique way to display social media buttons. It’s a bar that sticks to the bottom of the screen with sharing buttons for Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, and Pinterest.
It includes additional information as well, such as the title of the post, the author’s name, and the estimated amount of time it would take to read the article.
5. Sumo Image Sharer
If you regularly publish infographics or illustrations, visitors may find themselves wanting to just share the images on your site instead of entire posts.
Sumo Image Sharer allows your visitors to do just that. After you install the plugin, all you need to do is select which platforms the images can be shared to and where the buttons will be placed on the images. Then, you’re good to go.
6. Revive Old Posts
Revive Old Posts makes it possible to squeeze more value out of previously published content. You can set up this plugin to automatically share your old posts, which puts them in front of people who might have never seen them before.
This lets you draw in traffic without creating new content. It would take a good bit of tedious work to do this manually, but Revive Old Posts makes it easy.
7. Flow-Flow
Social media sharing doesn’t need to be a one-way street. In addition to sharing content from your site to social media platforms, you can also share content from social media platforms to your site.
Flow-Flow gives you the ability to select feeds from different social media platforms (including your own) and display them on your site in a grid-style layout. This Instagram/Pinterest-like experience creates a sort of positive feedback loop.
It engages the visitors on your site and encourages them to follow your social media accounts… and the more followers you have, the more traffic you’ll be able to bring to your site from social media.
8. Social Locker
With Social Locker, you can prevent visitors from viewing a piece of content until they perform a certain social media action for you, such as liking your business’s Facebook page.
Be careful with this one. Like a strong spice, too much Social Locker will ruin the dish. People will stop coming to your site if there’s a lock on everything.
The best approach is to save Social Locker for content that took extra effort to produce (eBooks, white papers, video guides, etc.), while keeping regular blog posts unlocked.
That way, you can use Social Locker to improve engagement on your social media accounts without driving people away from your site.
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