11 Essential WordPress Social Media Plugins for Newbie Bloggers to Increase Social Engagement

Smash Balloon Social Post Feed – Simple Social Feeds for WordPress

Smash Balloon Social Post Feed is a simple but powerful social media plugin for WordPress. It allows users to display Facebook posts on their WordPress site in an attractive feed that is completely customizable, responsive, search engine crawlable, and GDPR compliant.

Ideal for agencies, freelancers, and generic users, this plugin solves the problem of integrating social media content into a website in a visually appealing and SEO-friendly manner.

Features and Benefits

• Supports Facebook oEmbeds: Allows WordPress to support Facebook oEmbeds without needing a developer app, making it easier to embed Facebook content on your site.
• Super Simple to Set Up: Designed to be user-friendly and can be set up in less than a minute, saving time and making it accessible to non-technical users.
• Display Feeds from Your Facebook Page: Enables users to display feeds from any Facebook page they administer, allowing businesses or individuals to share relevant content with their website audience.
• Completely Customizable: Feed can be customized to match the style of the user’s WordPress theme, offering flexibility to align with their brand image.
• Elementor and Divi Ready: Integrates with popular page builders like Elementor and Divi, simplifying page building for users.
• SEO Friendly: Facebook feed content is crawlable by search engines, helping to improve a site’s SEO.
• GDPR Compliant: Integrates with popular GDPR cookie consent plugins, ensuring compliance with data protection regulations.
• Responsive and Mobile Optimized: Designed to look great on any screen size, ensuring accessibility for mobile users.

Pricing Structure

The plugin is free to use with the premium bundle priced at $598.

Social Media Share Buttons & Social Sharing Icons

The Social Media Share Buttons & Social Sharing Icons is a comprehensive social media plugin designed specifically for WordPress users. This plugin is an ideal tool for agencies, freelancers, and generic users who want to increase their social media engagement and online presence.

It resolves the challenge of integrating various social media platforms into a website, making it easier for visitors to share content and engage with the brand on different social media platforms.

The plugin supports a wide array of social media platforms, including RSS, Email, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram, and Youtube, among others.

Features and Benefits

• Icon Designs: The plugin offers 16 different designs for your social media share icons, allowing you to match the icons with your website aesthetics.
• Multiple Actions: Assign several actions to one social media icon, such as directing visitors to your Facebook page and offering them the option to like your page.
• Icon Animation: Animate your social media icons to attract visitor attention, increasing the chances of them sharing or following your blog.
• Float/Sticky Icons: Make your social media icons easily accessible by having them ‘float’ or ‘stick’ to the side of the page.
• Email Subscription: Enable visitors to subscribe to your blog via email for easier engagement.
• Social Media Counts: Add counts to your social media buttons to display the number of shares or likes.
• Customizable Pop-up: Display a customizable pop-up to encourage visitors to follow or share your blog via social media icons, with options to appear on all or selected pages.
• Post Sharing: Show sharing buttons and social media icons at the end of every post to encourage post-sharing.

Pricing Structure

The plugin is free to use with the premium version starting from $29.98.

Shareaholic

Shareaholic is a user-friendly WordPress plugin designed to help website owners increase audience engagement and growth.

Recognized as the world’s leading suite of audience development tools, Shareaholic allows users to add award-winning social share buttons, related posts, content analytics, and ad monetization to their website.

It is an ideal solution for agencies, freelancers, and generic users looking to boost their traffic, market their content, gain insights, and monetize their audience, all from a single, easy-to-use dashboard. Furthermore, with advanced code optimization techniques, the plugin ensures your site remains lightweight and fast.

Features and Benefits

• Social Media Share Buttons: Shareaholic offers award-winning social media share buttons that make it easy for website visitors to share content with their friends. This feature supports a wide array of social media platforms, including Facebook, Pinterest, WhatsApp, Twitter, Instagram, and many more, as well as theme features like HTML5 & XHTML, widgets, plugins, infinite scroll, post formats, and mobile optimization.
• Share Count Recovery: This premium feature ensures you never lose your share counts when you change URLs or switch to HTTPS. It ensures continuity and accuracy in tracking your social shares, which is essential for monitoring your social media performance.
• Privacy Features: Shareaholic adheres to the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), ensuring visitors’ data is not needlessly transmitted to social networks without their consent. This helps maintain the privacy of your visitors and builds trust with your audience.
• Share Buttons for Images: This feature automatically adds social share buttons like Pinterest’s “Pin It” button directly onto the images on your site. It increases outbound traffic to your social sites and inbound traffic to your website.
• Related Posts: This feature increases pageviews, engagement, and time on site by highlighting related content that may not otherwise be discovered on your site. It helps keep visitors on your site longer, increasing the chances of conversion.
• Content Analytics: Shareaholic provides important actionable metrics, including insights into popular pages on your website, referral channels, and top referrers. This helps you understand your audience better and formulate effective content and marketing strategies.
• Social Follow Buttons: This feature helps grow your social following by adding social follow buttons directly to your page. It increases your social media presence, leading to higher brand visibility and audience engagement.
• GDPR Cookie Notice: This feature actively notifies your visitors that your site uses cookies. It ensures compliance with GDPR regulations, protecting you from potential legal issues.
• Monetization: Shareaholic offers various monetization features, including affiliate links, native ads, and more. These features provide additional revenue streams for your website.

Pricing Structure

The plugin is free to use with the premium version starting from $8.

Hubbub Lite

Hubbub Lite, formerly known as Grow Social by Mediavine, is a robust and versatile social sharing button plugin designed to boost your social media engagement.

The plugin integrates seamlessly with your website, enabling users to share your content across multiple social media platforms. This excellent tool is a must-have for bloggers, digital agencies, and freelancers looking to improve their social reach, engagement, and website traffic.

Features and Benefits

• Share Buttons Above/Below: Place share buttons at strategic locations on your content, improving visibility and encouraging sharing.
• Floating Sidebar Buttons: Position share buttons on the left or right; they follow the user as they scroll, offering constant access.
• Share & Total Counts: Display share counts for all included social media networks, offering social proof and credibility.
• Editable Labels: Customize the labels on your share buttons to better engage with your audience.
• Retina Ready Icons: Utilize SVGs for sharp social media icons, ensuring a great look on any screen size.

Pro Version Features:

• 17+ Additional Networks: Increase your reach with added social share networks.
• Social Media Tags: Customize your social media preview title, description, and images.
• Mobile Sticky Footer: Keep sharing options readily available on mobile devices.
• Pop-Up Buttons: Trigger a pop-up with sharing buttons for higher engagement.
• Custom Button Colors: Personalize your share buttons to align with your website design.
• Shortcode: Place buttons anywhere with the [hubbub_share] shortcode.
• Bitly Integration: Keep URLs short and neat with Bitly.
• Google Analytics UTM: Track your source of incoming traffic.
• Follow Buttons Widget: Enable users to follow your social media profiles directly from your website.
• Sharable Quotes: Let readers share custom tweets with one click.
• Top Shared Posts Widget: Showcase your most shared articles on your website.
• Import/Export Settings: Easily move all settings from one website to another.

Pricing Structure

The plugin is free to use with the premium version starting from $49/year.

MashShare

MashShare is a high-performing, free WordPress plugin that is specifically designed to enhance social media shares and optimize your valuable content.

It offers a professional and highly customizable ecosystem for agencies, freelancers, or any general user looking to increase their social media engagement.

Unlike other social share buttons, MashShare uses no external scripts, ensuring faster loading times and maintaining user privacy.

Features and Benefits

• Most Social Shared Posts Widget: This feature allows you to see which posts are shared the most on social media, helping you understand what content resonates with your audience.
• Async Share Count Aggregation: Updates the number of shares in real-time, providing up-to-date insights into your content’s performance.
• Dashboard for Social Share Count: Quickly view the overall engagement of your content directly on your site’s dashboard.
• Short URL Integration: Makes your shareable content links more concise and clean, enhancing the user experience.
• Support for AMP: Improves your site’s mobile-friendliness, enhancing accessibility for users on mobile devices.
• High-Resolution Vector Font Icons: Offers high-quality social media icons, making your site look more professional and engaging.
• Object and Transient Caches: Enhances site loading speed, improving user experience.
• Highly Customizable: Provides control over the appearance and functionality of your social share buttons.

Pricing Structure

The core MashShare plugin is free to use. However, additional functionality can be added with premium add-ons available for purchase on the plugin’s website.

Shared Counts

Shared Counts is a robust WordPress plugin that adds social media share buttons to your blog posts or pages. The primary objective of this plugin is to increase traffic and engagement by motivating readers to share your content on their social media platforms.

This plugin is a practical tool for agencies, freelancers, and even general users looking to broaden their social media reach and boost audience interaction on their WordPress sites.

Features and Benefits

• Wide Array of Buttons: Includes buttons like Facebook Share, Pinterest Pin, Yummly, Twitter Tweet, Email Sharing, Share Count Total, Print, and LinkedIn Share, ensuring multiple platforms to share your content.
• Social Count Display: Tracks shares on Facebook, Pinterest, Yummly, and Twitter, providing insights into your content’s performance.
• Customization: Offers various styling options for share buttons, allowing alignment with your site design.
• HTTP Recovery: Retrieves both HTTP and HTTPS share counts, ensuring no loss of share counts when upgrading to HTTPS.
• GDPR Compliant: Does not use cookies or tracking scripts, nor stores user data, ensuring GDPR compliance.
• Performance-Friendly: Uses creative caching methods to minimize impact on site overhead.
• Developer-Friendly: Built with hooks and filters for easy customization and extension.

Pricing Structure

Shared Counts is a free plugin available for download and use on WordPress websites.

Sassy Social Share

Sassy Social Share is a powerful WordPress plugin designed to supercharge your website’s social engagement. It allows your visitors to share your content across a multitude of social media platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, WhatsApp, Tumblr, Pinterest, Reddit, Gab, Gettr, and many more.

It’s an essential tool for agencies, freelancers, and generic users who want to maximize their online reach and presence. This plugin is the perfect solution to increase traffic and engagement on your website by leveraging the power of social media.

Features and Benefits

• EU-GDPR Compliant: Adheres to European data protection regulations, ensuring your website is compliant and safe for users.
• Gutenberg Compatibility: Seamlessly integrates with the Gutenberg editor, allowing you to easily manage your shared content.
• Multilingual Support: Works with WPML for multilingual sites, broadening your potential audience.
• Social Media Icons: Redirects visitors to your social media pages, increasing followers and engagement.
• Icon Customization: Tailor the look of your sharing icons to match your brand’s aesthetic.
• Share Counter: Displays the share count for each social network to encourage more shares.
• URL Shortening: Integrates with URL shortening services to make shared links more manageable.
• Custom Target URL: Decide where your shared content leads, helping to increase site traffic.

Pricing Structure

Sassy Social Share is a free plugin, making it accessible to all users.

Social Media Widget

The Social Media Widget is a straightforward WordPress plugin designed to facilitate a stronger and more interactive experience between a website and its audience.

This plugin allows users to conveniently input their social media website profile URLs and other subscription options, which then materialize as icons on the website’s sidebar. Once clicked, these icons redirect users to the corresponding social media site in a new browser window.

This plugin is particularly beneficial for agencies, freelancers, and bloggers seeking to increase social engagement and drive more traffic to their social media profiles.

Features and Benefits

• Wide Social Media Support: From mainstream platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram to niche sites like Goodreads and DeviantArt, this plugin covers virtually any social media profile, enhancing engagement opportunities.
• Customizable Icon Sizes: Choose from 16×16, 24×24, 32×32, 64×64, or set a custom size for social media icons, allowing for seamless integration with your website’s design.
• Variety of Icon Packages: Offers four distinct icon packages – Web 2.0, Sketch, Heart, Cutout, and Custom, enhancing your website’s visual appeal.
• Animation Options: Includes Fade In, Scale, Bounce, and Combo animations for social media icons, adding dynamic effects to your site.
• Custom Hover Text: Create personalized image alt/title tags for hover-over text, improving the user experience.
• Adjustable Settings: Decide on using ‘nofollow’ tags, opening links in a new tab, aligning the widget, and ordering icons, providing complete control over the plugin’s functionality and appearance.
• Adjustable Icon Arrangement: Set the number of icons per row based on the container width, ensuring a tidy and organized display.

Pricing Structure

As of the current update, the Social Media Widget plugin is available for free on WordPress.org.

Jetpack Social

Jetpack Social is a revolutionary social media plugin designed to streamline your social media management and maximize your online presence. This WordPress plugin is perfect for newbie bloggers, agencies, freelancers, and generic users who desire an increased social engagement.

Jetpack Social solves the problem of time-consuming and inconsistent social media posting by enabling you to publish your content across multiple platforms at once.

It also offers unique tools for creating engaging social media content, helping to reach a wider audience and boost interaction.

Features and Benefits

• One-Click Publishing: Jetpack Social enables automatic sharing of your site’s posts on popular social media platforms like Facebook and Tumblr, allowing you to expand your audience by reaching site viewers and social media followers simultaneously.
• Centralized Management: Manage all your social media channels from a single hub with Jetpack Social, saving time and ensuring consistent posting across all platforms.
• Scheduling Tools: Set your posts to publish at optimal times with Jetpack Social’s scheduling tools, freeing you from being tied to your desk and ensuring content is published when fans are most active.
• Image Generator: The Social Image Generator in Jetpack Social automatically creates engaging imagery with options for custom text and various styles, boosting engagement and saving time by integrating the process within the WordPress editor.
• Organic Sharing: Share blog posts as native social media content with custom images, videos, and text using Jetpack Social’s Organic Content Sharing tool, enhancing engagement and saving time as manually published posts receive 50% more interaction compared to shared links.

Pricing Structure

Jetpack Social is available with the Jetpack Social plan.

Fuse Social Floating Sidebar

Fuse Social Floating Sidebar is an exceptional WordPress social media plugin tailored to simplify the insertion of social media links on your website. This plugin is a valuable asset for agencies, freelancers, and generic users aiming to increase their social engagement.

It provides an appealing interface for adding floating social media icons, with a variety of customization options.

Features and Benefits

• Icon Customization: The plugin offers two types of icons—round and square—allowing users to choose a style that best fits their website design.
• Animated Rotation Effect: Adds a unique aesthetic appeal to the social media icons, making them more engaging for website visitors.
• Shadow in Icons: Provides depth and a 3D effect to the icons, enhancing their overall appearance.
• Different Size Icons: Users can adjust the size of the icons to suit their website layout and design.
• Visibility on Scroll: Allows the social icons to pop up only when a user scrolls on the page, preventing them from cluttering the main hero section.
• Action Button Display: Displays social icons under the action button, providing a neat and organized look.
• Sticky Icons Customization: Enables users to customize the color of floating social icons according to their website design.
• Pro Version Features: Offers additional features such as custom icons, control over social icon visibility, an analytics interface, the ability to rearrange icons, and access to more icon designs.

Pricing Structure

The plugin is free to use with the premium version starting from $29.99.