facebook

WordPress Social Media Plugin: Social Warfare

A WordPress social media sharing plugin can increase your website traffic and help you earn recognition as an expert in your field. On today’s fast-moving, noisy internet it’s important to make it easy for the reader to share your posts. If it’s not easy or obvious, they will often give up and move on without sharing.

If you’re a WordPress user, the best way to do this is to use a social media plugin. I’ve tried quite a few through the years, but my current favorite is Social Warfare. There’s a free version available, but I use the Pro version, which is pretty reasonable at $29/year. I’ve used it for the past year or so and am more than satisfied. The plugin has more than one million downloads, so I know I’m not alone.

Now that I’m back writing again after a break from regular posts, I have decided to incorporate a new feature on this blog: WordPress Plugin of the Month.

How It Looks

Here’s how it looks on a blog post. You can add the icons on the left or right, or above and/or below the content, or all of the above if you like. Here I’m using the floating buttons, which move as the reader scrolls to keep them in the viewport.

WordPress plugin

Here’s a look at the settings page. At the top, you choose the social icons you want to use. Then you decide how you want to sort the buttons.

Let’s start with the first group of settings, which is where you’ll choose the social networks you want to include. It’s as simple as a drag and drop into the Active section for the sites you choose. Of course, this decision should be made based on the sites your audience visits.

WordPress social media plugin

You can sort manually or dynamically based on how many shares you get to each social network. You can choose to emphasize the first button or the first two buttons if you wish or not to empasize any buttons.

Next you’ll see the share count settings. If you don’t want to show your share counts, you can turn this option off completely. Or you can set a minimum number of shares below which the number doesn’t show.

WordPress social media plugin

In the Social Meta Tags section, you’ll want to turn on social meta and Open Graph tags and Twitter Cards, as they make shares of your post much more attractive with the inclusion of images and descriptions. Here’s a screenshot of a Facebook post from my website with the Open Graph tags active.

WordPress plugin

The next section lets you position your icons on the different pages of your site. You can customize placement on single post, archive and category pages, landing pages, and regular pages. After this section, you can customize Pinterest sharing and Yummly options.

WordPress social media plugin

Styling

There are numerous styling options for the appearance of your social media buttons. Choose your shape, size, alignment, and even a hover color. Floating share buttons can be added to either side of the page and move as the reader scrolls.

Click to Tweet

A great way to get readers to share your content on Twitter is to use a click to tweet button. Social Warfare allows you to choose between seven different styles of buttons or even style your own with CSS.

Gutenberg Blocks

Now in beta is Gutenberg blocks in Social Warfare – you can create a block from your social media share buttons. There is a warning that, due to the rapid pace of Gutenberg development, this feature may break things.

Other Features

Frame Buster keeps content pirates from framing your content. Social Warfare also includes analytics tracking, link shortening, and some advanced Pinterest settings.

Summary

I think Social Warfare is one of the best WordPress social media plugins I’ve used — I find it easy to use and customize and I like that it allows you to display the icons differently on different pages of your site.

You May Also Enjoy …

WordPress.org and WordPress.com

WordPress.org and WordPress.com

What’s the difference between WordPress.org and WordPress.com and which one should I use? This post will help you decide.

0 Comments

Talk Back to Me