5 Fantastic Plugins for Social Media Sharing and WordPress

Practically everywhere you go on the web, those little social media sharing buttons follow you. They’re like a puppy who’s just sure you have a treat in your pocket. They greet you at the beginning of webpages, follow you with “click to tweet” dialogues wherever you go, and are right there waiting for you at the end.

Social media growth has exploded in the last decade and continues to grow. Even if questions remain about how effective social media’s direct impact on revenue is, there’s little doubt in its potential to boost awareness and engagement for your business. That reason alone is enough to integrate social media with your WordPress website!

So, are you? If not, these plugins below are some of the best and most popular for social media sharing in WordPress. Explore them and find what works for you. Already have a plugin you use? You might just find an upgrade here. Let’s take a look!

5 Fantastic Plugins for Social Media Sharing

Better Click to Tweet

What it does is pretty simple: it adds a “Click to Tweet” option in the toolbar of your post editor. Not every social plugin has this feature. If you’ve got a social plugin that you’re happy with already that does not, Better Click to Tweet will fill that niche very nicely.

What sets it apart from others that do the same is the ability to customize the metadata that accompanies the tweet itself, handles non-Roman characters natively, and general customizability. The plugin author is actively updating and it has nothing but great reviews with almost 10k active installs.

Mashshare

This freemium plugin is modeled after the popular website Mashable’s social sharing functionality. The plugin itself is free and absolutely loaded with options, more so than a quick review can adequately do justice. If you want to tweak anything from the visual aesthetic of your buttons to the JS load order of the plugin itself, Mashshare lets you do it.

You don’t have to be technically minded to use Mashshare. It’s all configurable from their Dashboard tab via checkboxes without the need for custom CSS. On top of the free functionality is literally dozens of paid add-ons offering extra features galore. Very much worth a look!

Social Media Feather

Social Media Feather is exactly as its name implies, lightweight and easy to use. That’s not a bad thing if you’re not looking for an absolute galaxy of options and extensions to have to deal with. Don’t let the name fool you though! Even being more lightweight than plugins like Mashshare, it is still highly customizable.

Social Media Feather’s placement in posts and pages is handled by shortcode, and in your Dashboard setting you’ll find  a new Social Media tab. From there you can completely customize the look and feel of your icons, as well as the social media service providers that appear. It offers a wide range of integrations too, including not just standards like Facebook and Twitter, but also reddit, Pinterest, Tumblr, Vimeo, and others. It also has RSS options.

Ultimate Social Media Icons Plus

Ultimate Social Media Icons Plus is similar to Social Media Feather. It’s anything but a clone, however. It offers a similar variety of service integrations, but does cover some ground that SMF doesn’t (while at the same time omitting some that SMF does). If one doesn’t cover you, the other will. Ultimate Social Media Icons Plus also has the neat feature of allowing custom icons and links. If it doesn’t have one of your favorites, you can set it up without too much effort.

Where Ultimate Social Media Icons Plus really shines it its UI/UX. It adds a tab in your Dashboard that opens a list of 8 questions. Each question is expandable, and walking through each is the setup process for your sharing features. Once you’re finished, the plugin is configured and everything is setup exactly the way you want it to be. It’s very quick and easy with a great end result!

Social Warfare

So far we’ve been looking only at free or plugins available in the WordPress repo. I’d be remiss not to include Social Warfare in this list though despite it being a premium plugin. It’s what we use on all of our websites, and it’s incredible if you don’t mind the cost ($24/yr for a single site).

What justifies the cost? It is a highly optimized plugin with essentially every feature you could possibly want. Click to Tweet is included natively, the tweets themselves are highly customizable,  you can set featured images that will appear in the shared post on Facebook and Pinterest, UTM tracking is added to every share enabling social analytics, share counts are conserved when switching permalink structures, and more. On top of it all, it is very developer friendly, meaning if it doesn’t have a feature you want, you can build it or have it built relatively easily.

That’s a wrap. There are many more social media sharing plugins out there, and this certainly wasn’t meant to be a comprehensive list. The problem is that there are so many! I couldn’t tell you how many initially looked good, only to turn around and require a paid membership to receive the features advertised in the repo! That said, this list will at the very least let you know what you ought to be getting out of great social sharing plugin. Good luck and happy sharing!