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The 15 Best WordPress Plugins for Increasing Social Media Shares

Social media has become all-encompassing.

Want to read the news? Check Facebook or Twitter. Need some entertainment? There’s always YouTube. Craving inspiration? Go on Pinterest or Instagram.

Social media is incredibly important to our everyday personal lives. For marketers, it’s important to their everyday professional lives, too.

With social media marketing, the end goal is to use platforms like Facebook and Twitter to get people to buy from you. Some of these, like Facebook, even let you set up your own online store.

How do you get people interested in your products and services? By posting content that’s crisp, clean, and appealing. You encourage others to share that content as well as click the like button.

If you’re lucky, this translates to site traffic, leads, and maybe even new customers.

You don’t always have to be on social media to work on your social media marketing. If you have a WordPress blog, for instance, you can use plugins that can increase social shares.

Here are 15 WordPress plugins designed to do just that.

1. WP Social Sharing

Are your share buttons kind of old? Are you sure the links are even live?

With WP Social Sharing, you can get responsive and snazzy buttons for all your favorite social media platforms.

WP Social Sharing currently supports Pinterest, Xing, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, and Facebook.

So how does it work? These buttons are intended for devices using a 480px width or larger. The buttons still work with a device width smaller than that, but they shift into icons instead of buttons.

Copy the plugin code as needed and add it to the code on your website. Next time you log on, you’ll see your buttons. Since these aren’t images, they load faster.

2. MashShare

Calling itself “the ultimate social media ecosystem,” MashShare is another plugin for better-looking social media share buttons. Unlike WP Social Sharing though, with MashShare, there’s a myriad of add-ons you can install to really give your website an overhaul.

Even if you just want the social share button, MashShare isn’t free. The company offers four pricing plans that are all in euros. We translated these into United States dollars.

Ultimate Plan

For $372 per year, the Ultimate Plan comes with a video add-on, all other add-ons, and lifetime support and updates. You can also use this plan with unlimited websites.

Pro Plan

At only about $218 per year, the Pro Plan is a better value for those who want to try out the MashShare add-ons but aren’t sure about committing long-term. You get the video add-on, 12 other add-ons, a year of support and updates, and use on unlimited sites.

Business Plan

The Business Plan costs only $130 a year. You’re still getting all the add-ons and a year of support and updates, but you can only use this for up to five sites.

Personal Plan

If you want to sample MashShare, give the Personal Plan a try. This is by far the cheapest plan at $42 per year. You also get the least, as you can only use eight add-ons (excluding the video add-on) on one website.

3. Sumo Share

Sumo Share promises you more traffic (by 20 percent) when using its social sharing apps. Since the service is free, you have nothing to lose by downloading and installing it.

According to the development team, it takes a mere 37 seconds to install this plugin. The development team themselves used the tool to increase their subscriber count to more than a million.

If you do enjoy Sumo Share, feel free to upgrade to the Sumo Pro Small, Medium, Big, or Sumo packages. Depending on which you choose, you may get:

  • Live optimization
  • VIP support
  • Advanced display rules
  • Lack of “Sumo” branding so your social media is really your own
  • Templates
  • Access to all apps.

The Sumo Basic package is always free, but you can only use the apps on one website and your use is limited.

4. Jetpack

While it’s known for its social sharing capabilities, Jetpack is so much more than that. This is a comprehensive WordPress website designer that also offers support and security services. Of course, we’re just going to focus on the social sharing.

Here are the features you can expect when you download Jetpack:

  • Related posts so customers can engage in your past content
  • Automatic promotion for better visibility
  • Post and content sharing
  • Stats so you can assess traffic and shares
  • Button customization design and placement
  • Sidebar social sharing buttons
  • Like button for Facebook posts
  • WordPress, Google, and Twitter sharing buttons

Jetpack has just two plans: a free and personal plan. The free plan is actually quite involved, and, with the promise of being “free forever,” is a great deal.

Free Plan

The Free Plan includes basic support, basic security (secure logins, uptime monitoring, and brute force attack protection), 165 free themes, traffic tools, design tools, and site stats.

Personal Plan

For an annual price of $40, you can try the Personal Plan. This comes with priority support, a 30-day archive, spam filtering, one-click restores, daily backups, access to the same themes, and the rest of the above services.

5. Monarch

Boasting more than 401,632 members as of this writing, Monarch has plugins for social media sharing, email opt-ins, and page building. Again, we’re only going to focus on the social sharing plugin.

Monarch comes jam-packed with handy features for successful growth on social media. For example, you can use Monarch to:

  • Run analytics on likes, follows, and shares
  • Design your icons, including where these go, what color they are, and what style they are
  • Showcase your social counts on these icons
  • Add hover effects to your buttons

Monarch is known for its high speeds, so the information it sends to your site from your social media accounts is always accurate.

You can pay a single-time fee of $250 for lifetime access to all features. If you prefer, you can also pay an annual total of $89.

6. Floating Social Bar

Thomas Griffin and Syed Balkhi developed the Floating Social Bar. The two did work for WPBeginner as well.

They decided to create a plugin that wouldn’t bog down the speed of their users’ websites just for some spiffy social bars.

Hence the Floating Social Bar was born. As of this writing, more than 20,000 people have downloaded this free tool. It’s known for its ease of use, with included drag and drop tools so your social buttons are placed exactly where you want them.

The Floating Social Bar supports Pinterest, LinkedIn, Google+, Facebook, and Twitter. Its only downside is that it’s been two years since the last update.

7. Shareaholic

Shareaholic is the plugin favored by Hootsuite, Orbitz, Smithsonian.com, Vistaprint, and Strava, so that’s telling you something. With the goal of “taking your website to the next level,” Shareaholic can be used for creating native advertising, analytics, and monetizing your website.

You have nearly countless options for ways to design your social share buttons on Shareaholic. You can adjust the alignment and the size, layout, and positioning. You can display just one social media button or several. There’s also an option to add a share counter and a headline so your button is customized.

There are four themes Shareaholic offers for social sharing buttons. These are sexy, flat circle, flat square, and classic. You can even preview what the buttons will look like before confirming your choices.

If you want to use Shareaholic for its buttons, you don’t have to pay, but you do have to exchange your email address. If you’re interested in the other services, you should review the pricing page.

8. ShareThis

Yet another free plugin for social sharing is ShareThis. This supports up to 80 social media platforms. That means you get mainstream options like LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest, and Facebook as well as lesser-knowns like WhatsApp.

This year, the developers updated the code for the ShareThis plugin so it’s quicker and more efficient. Now you can customize your sharing buttons so these blend in better with your website.

9. AddThis

AddThis is a suite of tools for WordPress marketers. The services offered are link promotion, list building, related posts, follow buttons, and share buttons. We’ll discuss the latter two features.

Supporting more than 65 social media platforms, AddThis’ follow buttons are mobile-optimized and customizable. You can choose from either inline or header buttons and tweak these until they’re just right.

Then there’s the share buttons. You can use these for even more social media platforms, with 200 (and growing!) currently supported. Take your pick from four buttons: inline, expanding, image sharing, and sidebar.

Like AddThis’ follow buttons, these are made for mobile use. You can also customize the buttons to your heart’s content.

If you plan on using basic buttons, you can use AddThis for free for life. If you want to make more advanced buttons, though, you’ll have to pay a monthly fee of $10 for AddThis Pro or $75 for AddThis Business.

10. Kiwi Social Sharing

Like a few of the other plugins on our list, Kiwi Social Sharing prioritizes site loading speed. Its buttons are limited to just two files for reliable speed.

Minimizing HTTP requests to load icons, limiting icon size (small, medium, or large), and offering square icons also keep your site loading quickly.

Here are some other features you’ll enjoy if you download this free plugin:

  • Ideal rendering for desktop and mobile users with SVG
  • Icons can be placed on pages or posts
  • Rounded corners and shift-style icons
  • Four colors and styles
  • Change the positioning of share bar icons
  • Turn off icons for certain posts

As for now, email, Google+, Pinterest, Reddit, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook are the only social media platforms supported.

11. Sossy

Sossy differentiates itself from the rest of the plugins on this list. Instead of specializing in social buttons, this plugin lets users build a social counter and social profile.

The profile includes your follower count, top social media fans, various descriptions, a cover, and images. It’s designed to be customizable so you can place this profile on your website, social media pages, or even your blog.

Sossy supports social media platforms like Delicious, GitHub, Vimeo, Dribbble, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram, Google+, YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook. Whether you’re a fan of smaller social media platforms or the big ones, you don’t have to choose with Sossy.

If building your profile sounds complicated, it isn’t. You can use drag and drop tools. Profiles are fast-loading thanks to the cache time option.

You can even make an unlimited amount of profiles.

To use Sossy, you have to pay a one-time fee of $18 for a regular license. This includes six months of support, access to future updates, and quality control. If you want 12 months of support, you have to pay another $5.25.

12. SocialFans

A good alternative to Sossy is SocialFans. Whether you want to showcase your followers with short codes or widgets, this is the plugin to do it. SocialFans is also Retina Responsive, meaning the images used are high-quality.

Up to 30 social media platforms are supported, so feel free to show prospective customers just how far your social media reach extends.

Each button has a stark solid background color, a social media logo, and your subscriber count. SocialFans even totals up all your followers across your social media platforms and displays that.

To use, you can pay a one-time fee of $17. Extra support costs $4.88.

13. AccessPress Social Icons PRO

If you’re in the mood to build your own icons, AccessPress Social Icons PRO is a cheaper option than some of the other plugins on this list. You can get a full license for just $20. For that price, you get six months of support, access to future updates, and quality control.

Much like SocialFans, you can pay extra ($6 in this case) for a year of support.

The customized buttons run on short code so you can paste these on your blog, website, or anywhere else you desire.

Browse through the 26 icon sets that come predesigned when you download AccessPress. These may inspire your own designs.

If you prefer, you can combine a few buttons together into icon sets. This is a great way to showcase your biggest fans. All icons are nestled in a sidebar so these buttons don’t hog up too much room on your site.

If you’re feeling festive, there are even Christmas icons available.

14. Flow-Flow

A social stream plugin, Flow-Flow projects your social media feeds on your website or blog. Not only can your customers see your posts in real time, but they can also search the social media feed for the content they’re looking for. Whether it’s reviews, pictures, or news, Flow-Flow shows them all.

If you have multiple social media accounts, you can choose to project them all at once or combine a few.

This sounds incredibly useful, but you’re probably worried about Flow-Flow dragging down your website load time. The developers thought ahead, running Flow-Flow as a background server task and including smart caching.

Flow-Flow is even optimized for mobile use.

The developers recently rolled out Version 3.0, which includes the following:

  • A social activity bar
  • Auto-updates
  • Improved design
  • A drag and drop card builder
  • Streaming layouts

A full license is $29, with extra support another $9.38.

15. Blog2Social

Schedule your content for auto-posting on social media with Blog2Social. You can even cross-promote posts across various social media channels.

A lot of Blog2Social’s features are free, including custom sharing. With this feature, the power is in your hands. You get to pick which platforms you post to, which hashtags you use, whether comments will be open, and the length of your post.

If you want to condense a Facebook post to fit Twitter’s character limit, you’d use custom sharing.

You can even check out when your posts will go live on social media with Blog2Social’s social media reporting. If you need to delay or push up a post, you can. This feature is also free.

That said, some of Blog2Social’s features require a premium account to use.

Takeaways

Is your social media popularity slumping? Do you wish you had access to share and follow buttons and other tools so your social sharing was more efficient?

Instead of downloading bulky, pricy programs, browse through WordPress’ plugins. There are many plugins that can transform your social media marketing experience.

It’ll be easier than ever for you to post content, encourage your followers to share, and keep track of who is liking and retweeting what. More social media shares are only a plugin away.

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