Social media is a fundamental part of running a small business. Whether you are a marketing consultant or a small independent coffee shop, you need to be on some form of social media.
However, it’s not enough just to have social media pages for your business. To take full advantage of the benefits and potential of social media you need to ensure that your website is social media friendly. Only by creating good content and providing ample opportunities for visitors to share can you effectively drive traffic to your website.
Thankfully, there is no shortage of social media plugins available to help integrate social media into your WordPress website. In fact, there may be too many making it difficult to choose the best one for you.
Here are some of my favourite social media plugins for WordPress.
Social Pug
Built with ease of use and efficiency in mind. Social Pug is lightning-fast and provides the best social sharing tools available
Social Pug is the plugin I use on this website, I switched to it after having issues with another social sharing plugin. It has a number of excellent features that allow you to customise how your posts are shared on different platforms.
Social Pug features include:-
- Customize your share settings – custom Tweets to be shared and Pinterest images and descriptions
- Click to Tweet
- Floating Sidebar Share Buttons
- Pop Up Share Buttons
- Mobile Sticky Share Buttons
- Select and arrange any social networks from the available ones to create custom sharing options for your readers.
- Social Share Counts
- Link Shortening Integrations
SumoMe
Free and easy way to double your email subscribers. And Sharing tools to double your traffic from Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest & more. – SumoMe
If you are looking for a free plugin to help you grow your website traffic then look no further than SumoMe. With over 400,000 websites currently using the tool, it’s one of the most popular social media plugins.
SumoMe features include:-
- List builder – allowing you to add signups to your website in the form of pop ups.
- Heat maps – find out what areas of your website are popular with visitors.
- Social share buttons – add share buttons to pages and posts in various locations.
- Smart bar – add a bar at the top of your website to include a signup or offer you are running.
- Image sharer – set up your images to be shared on Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest when you hover over them.
- Welcome mats – show a full size screen call to action when people visit your website.
The standard SumoMe plugin is free to use but you can upgrade for us little as $20 per month to use the pro versions of the apps. I used SumoMe on this website for awhile and was really impressed with the social features on the free version.
Instagram feed
Display beautifully clean, customizable, and responsive feeds from multiple Instagram accounts.
I’ve used a few Instagram widget plugins before and was never completely satisfied with the performance or look of them. Then I found the Instagram Feed plugin from Smash Balloon and it’s now the only one I use on my site and clients websites.
If you are looking for an attractive and easy to customise way to display your Instagram photos, this is the perfect plugin.
The plugin is super easy to setup and includes so many options to customise how the feed displays on your website. You can set it to full width, into columns and rows, set the number of photos displayed, the spacing between images and even the size of the image.
Your Instagram feed can then be displayed anywhere on your website using the built-in shortcodes. It is even possible to include multiple feeds on the same page.
Click To Tweet
This plugin allows you to create beautiful Click To Tweet boxes anywhere in your blog post.
Click To Tweet is a handy plugin that allows you to add tweetable content within your blog posts. This could be a quote or a custom message that visitors can click on to generate a ready-made tweet for them to share on Twitter.
Encourage shares of your content by making it easy for visitors with click to tweet links.Adding click to tweet links can help boost shares of your content and articles as it takes the hassle out of creating tweets for the readers. Allowing them to simply click the link and their tweet can be scheduled or posted instantly.
FINAL THOUGHTS
In a world dominated by the internet and social media, we need to keep finding new ways to seamlessly integrate our websites and social media. Particular if we want to get eyes on our website content. The plugins above are fantastic tools to help you boost shares and in turn, drives more traffic back to your website.
