Social networks are an essential marketing tool to make your website known to the world. Like it or not, this is it. If you’re of “old school” and didn’t want to get into social media, now it’s the time to give it a try. So get started by creating profiles on the most popular social networks to start promoting your content there.
The next step is to integrate social networks with your website. Luckily for you, WordPress has a lot of plugins that help you with this task. As there are so many of them, I’ve taken the time to make a list of those I think you can use most. I’m pretty sure that whether you are a newbie or an experienced user, you’ll find something interesting here.
I encourage you to take a look at the features of these plugins and evaluate the possibility of installing some of them, if you think it is convenient. Here is the list…
Better Click To Tweet
Let’s start with a basic plugin to highlight content from your website and make it very easy for your visitors to share on Twitter. With Better Click To Tweet, through a shortcode, you can highlight a sentence or a portion of text (remember, less than 280 characters to fit into a tweet) and the plugin will display it beautifully, as you can see in the following image:
In addition, if you don’t like the previous design, you can modify it with CSS to suit your preferences. And another quite interesting feature it includes is the support for URL shorteners (through third-party plugins).
If you want your content to be shared more on Twitter, don’t hesitate to install it and try it to see how it works. But of course, select funny sentences to attract your visitors’ attention or nobody will share them.
Highlight and Share
If what you’re looking for is a more advanced option than Better Click To Tweet, this plugin may be what you need. As its name suggests, Highlight and Share allows your visitors to select a text fragment of your content and easily share it across multiple social networks. You can even send an e-mail with the selection.
See how it works by looking at the next picture:
The good thing about the plugin is that it also works on mobile devices. So if the majority of your audience visits your site on a mobile phone, you won’t have any problems with it.
Nelio Content
I’m so happy about Nelio Content that I will sound like a payed advocate… but here’s why you’ll love it: it works as promised, its auto-scheduling feature is top-notch, Nelio’s value for money is unmatched, and the support team feels like your own.
Panozk
Instagram Feed
If you are a fan of photography, and Instagram is your kingdom of happiness, I’m sure you will want to bring your photos from that social network to your website. Now you can do it thanks to the Instagram Feed plugin, which can be used to increase your number of followers in Instagram showing the photos you have there directly in your WordPress contents.
Among the most outstanding features of the plugin, we find the possibility to include photos from more than one Instagram profile, change the size of the photos that are displayed in WordPress, modify the design of the plugin with CSS, or even show a button so that visitors can follow you on Instagram.
Pinterest Pin It Button On Image Hover And Post
Continuing with the photos, I’m sure you have visited websites where when you hover over the images with your mouse, a button appears whose action is Pin it. If you click, you can share the image on Pinterest, which is the social network for sharing images that allows users to create and manage collections of images such as events, interests, hobbies, etc., in thematic personal boards.
With this WordPress plugin you can achieve exactly that behavior. By simply installing and activating it, your images will have the Pinterest button. In addition, you can change both the color and size of the button.
If your content is rich in images created by you, don’t underestimate the value of this social network. The results you can achieve will surprise you.
WordPress Social Login
On many occasions you will want your visitors to become users of your website. To do this, they’ll first need to sign up for it. This means entering personal data and, worst of all, thinking about which password to use and remembering it when they come back.
To avoid this, the Social Login plugin allows your visitors to sign up on your website using the credentials of their profiles from the most popular social networks. This way, they don’t have to enter a password to access your website.
More than 60 thousand active installations guarantee the quality of this plugin. So if it suits your needs, don’t hesitate to try it and see if the number of registrations to your site increases with this new option.
AddToAny Share Buttons
A very common thing on websites is to display button bars with social network icons to encourage your visitors to share your content on them. The AddToAny plugin allows you to configure this type of bars and display them on your website in WordPress.
The plugin is compatible with Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Google, WhatsApp, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Reddit, and more than 100 content sharing networks. It is also one of the most popular WordPress plugins, with over 400,000 active installations.
You have a lot of options available to set up the social icon bar, its design, and where it will be displayed. It also integrates with Google Analytics and URL shorteners.
If you’ve always wanted to have a bar of this style, don’t hesitate to try this plugin in your WordPress to see if you increase traffic and engagement.
Social Media Share Buttons & Social Sharing Icons (Ultimate Sharing)
This plugin does the same job as AddToAny, allowing you to add a button bar to share your content across multiple networks – they claim to include support for more than 200 platforms.
It has a lot of features to modify the behavior of the button bar, including animations in the icons of social networks, to be able to see the count of the amount of shares on each network, or to change the way the bar is displayed.
In the WordPress plugin directory you will find many plugins to display these icon bars. That’s why I wanted to leave you two instead of one. The good thing about Ultimate Sharing is that it includes a premium version, so if you’re going to need support when using it, it can certainly be a very interesting option to evaluate.
WordPress Social Share, Social Login and Social Comments Plugin – Super Socializer
I wanted to include this plugin in the list because it includes three interesting functions. The first one is the ability to add a sharing button bar on social networks, just like AddToAny and Ultimate Sharing. They also allow the sign-up of users with their social networks rather than having to use the combination of username and password, as Social Login also did. So with this plugin you already cover what two plugins did separately.
But the feature I want to highlight here is that it integrates Facebook and Google+ comments into the WordPress comment box. In this way, your visitors can choose to post the comment on these networks, but you will also have it on your website.
If you are interested in having all this without having to search for 3 plugins, it’s obvious that Super Socializer is what you are looking for. It has over 40,000 active installations and many positive opinions in the official WordPress directory. Try it and tell us how you did.
Revive Old Post – Auto Post to Social Media
If you have old content on your website, but you think it is still valid, not promoting it is a shame. Surely it took you a long time to create this content just to have it there wasted.
To help you give a new life to your old content you have the plugin Revive Old Post, which will share this content on social networks with a certain frequency. You’ll be able to set up how often you want to share old posts in order to maintain a steady pace of promoting your blog on social networks.
If you don’t take advantage of your old content yet, give this plugin a chance to see if you can increase your traffic.
Nelio Content – Auto Publish on Social Media
I couldn’t finish this list without mentioning Nelio Content, the plugin we developed to help throughout the editorial process, including promoting your content on social networks.
With Nelio Content, you can schedule social messages as you write content in your WordPress. This makes you more efficient and, once the content is written and scheduled to be published, you will also have a complete queue of promotional messages ready to be published when the right time comes.
In addition, the automatisms we have included allow you to create these promotional messages with incredible simplicity. Our plugin analyzes your content and extracts relevant phrases to create the most interesting promotional messages. But it also lets you suggest which phrases you think the plugin should use for promotion. Thanks to this, the creation of the entire promotional campaign for your content is done with just one click.
Thanks to all these social functions, we’ve been able to multiply by 3 the visits to our website throughout this year. Not bad at all, huh?
Feel free to take a look and try it on your WordPress site. We look forward to hearing from you ?
What Plugin Do I Need for My WordPress?
When you come across a list like the one I’ve left you here, you might get a crazy urge to install all the suggested plugins. Wrong! Remember that the most important thing you need to take care of is to install only those plugins that you really need and avoid having repeated plugins that do the same.
So be careful because there are a lot of plugins out there that can break something in contact with other plugins or themes from your installation. Of course, this is not the case of our plugin Nelio Content, since there are usually others who break it for not following the standard development guidelines from WordPress ?.
In short, I hope you find this list useful in your goal of linking your WordPress site with social networks. Remember that you have the comments box below to leave me your opinion about all of it.
Featured image by Japheth Mast via Unsplash.
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