Social media is a great marketing channel to generate a following of any kind. You can potentially reach millions of people. And those people can share your content and reach even more users! Social media drives traffic to your website to engage with your content and readers from your website to social networking sites, to promote and share your content.
WordPress plugins are your best friends to connect your website with your social media accounts. In this article, I want to introduce you to what I think are the best social media WordPress plugins for your marketing.
Great plugins allow you to integrate helpful social media features directly into your WordPress website. For example, they provide features for your readers to easily follow your social streams, to like, share, pin, and comment on your posts. There are also great plugins to help you share your own content automatically on your social media accounts.
Here are the must-have social media plugins for your WordPress website:
Essential social media plugin features for your website
- Follow buttons for your social media channels
- Social media share buttons for your posts and pages
- Share icons for your images
- Social media automation plugins for scheduling and sharing your posts
- Streams for your social media feeds to display current updates on your site
WordPress social media plugins for follow buttons
Looking for ways to grow your social community? Your loyal website visitors are your most likely social media fans, as they obviously like your content already!
By adding social media follow buttons for Facebook, Twitter and other networks, you make it easy for readers to follow you with just one click.
Here are the best plugins for integrating follow buttons into your site easily:
- Social Media Follow Buttons Bar (free)
A simple button bar for your website. You can have the social media follow buttons automatically added to the bottom of all posts and/or pages and position the buttons with either a widget, shortcode or template action hook. Choose the size of the icons. Visitors can open the link in a current or new tab. - Simple Social Icons (free) was created by Studiopress. Simply display social media follow buttons on your site with this basic plugin.
- Monarch ($ 89 including numerous other premium themes and plugins by Elegant Themes)
Offers beautiful social media follow & social media sharing buttons. You can add buttons from 20 social networks, add it as a widget at any place on your blog. It offers more design options, like floating bars or automatic pop-up and fly-in animations.
WordPress social media plugins for share buttons
Hardly any other function for WordPress offers more choices for plugins than social media share buttons. They are essential for your website! They make it so easy for your website visitors to share your content with their followers.
Here are the best plugins for adding social media share buttons to your website:
- Custom Share Buttons with Floating Sidebar (free & premium from $40)
Adds basic share buttons and floating sidebars for popular social networks including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Pinterest at the top or the bottom of your content on your homepage, pages, posts or categories/archives. A floating sidebar stays in place on the side of your screen, even while you are scrolling. Floating bars for mobile devices are available with the Pro version as well as many other options. - Super Socializer- WordPress Social Share, Login and Comments Plugin (free & premium from $5,99)
Fully responsive social share buttons for 100+ social networks and follower counts for Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter, Buffer, Reddit, Pinterest and VKontakte, with multiple customization options for size, shape, background, logo color, and more. Icons can be positioned at the top or bottom of your content or with horizontal or vertical floating bars. Enable visitors to log in with 9 social network accounts for social media comments for Facebook and disqus. - Social Media Share Buttons | MashShare (free & premium from 39€)
This plugin is highly customizable. The free version supports Facebook and Twitter and displays big and bold social media icons above and/or below posts, pages, and other post types. Mashare counts the total number of shares and views, which can be optionally displayed. Nine premium add-ons (at €39 per year each for a single site license) offer a wide variety of options, including 17 other networks, analytics, widgets, floating bars and more. - Social Warfare (free & premium from $29/year)
You can add share buttons above/below your posts or via shortcode, floating share bars and share counts in a variety of locations on your blog without slowing down your site. The premium option offers more networks for sharing, for example ‘Pin’ buttons for Pinterest, Tweet quotes and fully customizable share texts and many more.
Social media image share buttons for your WordPress website
Encourage your website visitors to share your visual content to social media! Especially your images and infographics.
Sites like Pinterest, Instagram and search engines like Google image and video search which are directly displayed in the regular search index are focused on visual content only. Your images can drive additional traffic from all these sources to your website.
Social Sharing Buttons for your images make it easy for your website visitors to share your images separately from your post instead of just sharing the post and the featured image.
- AddToAny (free)
The plugin offers a universal hover over button to share on a large variety of networks and email sharing. Choose between different icon sizes, custom styles and places for showing the button, including a shortcode to place it anywhere. - Share This Image (Code Canyon premium plugin from $29)
Simply share your images on the 11 most popular social networks. The admin option allows customizing and seeing all the settings on one page.
Social media automation plugins for your WordPress website
It’s great if other users share your content using the social sharing buttons mentioned earlier, but you shouldn’t count on it. Use every opportunity to share and promote your content yourself. Cross-promoting your post on multiple social networks will help you to drive a consistent stream of traffic to your site.
Sharing your content manually every time you publish a new post can become quite tiresome and time-consuming, especially if you publish regularly and on multiple networks. Social media automation plugins can help you to automatically share your posts and save you loads of time and work. There are multiple choices for tools and plugins for auto-publishing your posts.
However, don’t be careless with social media automation. Make sure to customize your posts and interact with your communities, to keep your social media streams lively and human.
To cross-promote your content successfully, don’t just post exactly the same message on every social network. Use tools that help you to optimize your social media posts to fit each social media platform and community.
One of my personal favorites: Blog2Social – Smart Social Media Automation (free & premium from € 6 per month) 
Blog2Social Social Media Automation: schedule and share your blog posts automatically on your social media accounts
Blog2Social is a very powerful WordPress plugin with many options to schedule, share and cross-promote your blog posts across multiple social media channels at once. The plugin allows you to customize your posts and to automatically schedule your posts.
Many popular social networks, such as Facebook (profiles, pages), Twitter, Telegram, LinkedIn (profiles, pages), XING, Instagram, Flickr, Pinterest, Tumblr, Medium, Torial, Reddit, Bloglovin, Diigo, Google My Business and VK are available for auto-publishing your content.
Blog2Social automatically adds text and hashtags to your posts, always in an adapted format for each network. You can individualize all social media posts with your own comments, hashtags, handles or emojis, select specific images for your posts and much more.
You may also re-post your old posts and automatically schedule posts for every new piece of content that goes live on your website.
This plugin helps you to create engaging social media posts to attract your followers for more likes, shares, and comments.
Blog2Social is free for sharing and customizing your social media posts, but you might also find it worth to try the premium version for advanced scheduling and sharing.
Other great plugins for social media automation are:
- Facebook Auto Publish (free)
You can publish your posts to Facebook automatically as a simple text message, a text message with an image or with an attached link to your blog. - WP LinkedIn Auto Publish (free)
This plugin lets you publish posts and pages automatically from WordPress to your LinkedIn profile or company page. Enables simple text-based sharing or more advanced sharing with your featured image. You can set up a default share message format for all your posts. Posts cannot be scheduled with this plugin. - JetPack (free & premium from $7,50)
Sharing automatically to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Reddit, and WhatsApp is integrated with the JetPack plugin package which also provides you with some other great tools for your site, for example site stats and analytics. It provides auto-posting, but no customizing or scheduling.
The best social media plugins for social streams
Social media follow buttons are important means to turn your website visitors into followers. But before they follow you, they might want a peak at your social media channels. That’s where plugins for social media streams come in.
You can implement social feed widgets for each of your networks into your sidebar or into your content. A social stream combining multiple social feeds is a great possibility for your blog to show off all of your updates and contents in a single lifestream. Social stream plugins optimize and present your entire variety of content from social networks in a more organized way.
- Social Stream Designer ($19) is a powerful plugin that streams all social media posts together on one page. It supports 14 popular social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, Vimeo, Tiktok, and so on. With this plugin you can choose from 6 astonishing layout styles. It has 40+ options available in layout settings to customize the look & feel of social feeds. The auto-refreshing API makes sure you keep seeing the latest content.
- Flow Flow Social Streams (free & premium from $39)
With this plugin you can stream social feeds in a customizable design on your WordPress website. You can select any combinations of social feeds from multiple accounts, connected with the same single stream. If you’d like, include social media counters for comments, likes, views and sharing buttons to increase user engagement. Additionally, users can sort and search networks on top of your stream. You can even create your very own design for your grid. - Feed Them Social (free & premium from $30)
Add as many social feeds as you need, implement with shortcodes. The premium version provides customizing options to choose how many posts, pictures, tweets, or videos for each individual social feed! - Instagram Feed (free & premium $49/Year)
You just want to share your Instagram feed? Display the feed anywhere on your site including posts, pages, or sidebar widgets, as well as create multiple feeds for multiple Instagram accounts.
Get started with your social media marketing!
As you can see, social media plugins are one of the easiest ways to save a ton of work AND generate a lot of traffic to your website at the same time! Choose a plugin from each of the categories above, and you have created a great starter kit for your social media marketing.
Let us know in the comments below what experiences you’ve had with these plugins or if maybe you have additions to this list! I look forward to hearing from you.
