Having a website with WordPress is only half the battle. Whether it's a blog, an online store with WooCommerce or a website for your company or agency. If you want your content to be seen, there's almost no way around social media. That's why we're presenting five popular social media plugins for WordPress today.
These help you to increase the reach of your website. After all, how do readers and customers actually find your website? There are almost two billion websites on the internet, so on average there is one page for every four people in the world. It is therefore almost impossible for large numbers of people to find your website on their own - unless you already have a huge target group, brand or the corresponding level of awareness.
SEO, offline marketing and social media
There are many ways in which you can make your WordPress website better known: you can optimize your content for search engines such as Google. This is called Search Engine Optimization (SEO). See our step-by-step guides on WordPress SEO, the SEO audit and keyword research. You could also do offline marketing if you already have a brick-and-mortar store. However, the easiest way is via social networks.
Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tik Tok, Snapchat, Telegram, Pinterest, Clubhouse - there is the right network for almost every target group, as our social media comparison shows. But it's not enough to simply set up profiles and actively operate them. You also need to optimize your WordPress website for social media. This is particularly important:
- The visually appealing linking of your channels
- An easy way for visitors to share your content
- Automated and time-saving tools for you to also distribute this content via social media, i.e. for social seeding
For this reason, we have taken a look at five social media plugins for WordPress that can really boost your website's reach. However, pay attention to the compatibility of these WordPress plugins with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), more on this later.
Social media marketing: the basics
Social Media Share Buttons Popup & Sharing Icons
- Development: UltimatelySocial
- Active installations: over 200,000
- Ratings: 5 out of 5 stars with over 5,000 ratings
If your WordPress theme does not come with social media buttons out of the box (which should be standard these days) or if you have higher requirements for the included options, the WordPress plugin Social Media Share Buttons Popup & Pop Up Social Sharing Icons may be a suitable option for you.
This plugin allows you to integrate social media buttons into your website in many different ways. Theoretically, you have over 200 social media platforms at your disposal - including, of course, the most important ones: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tik Tok, Snapchat, Telegram, Pinterest, WhatsApp and a button for sharing via email.
You can also integrate these buttons in 16 different designs and place them exactly where and how you want them. This also includes, for example, the option to display the buttons "sticky". This means they always remain in the image, even when users scroll down. The plugin also supports pop-ups and counts (i.e. a display of how often your posts have been shared).
However, please always pay attention to the GDPR component here (and with every other plugin) - the developer has set up an exemplary page for his plugin where you can see exactly what the plugin is doing on your site in terms of data protection.
The plugin is available for free in the WordPress plugin directory. If you need even more options, there is also a premium version for 30 to 40 US dollars (depending on whether you run a commercial or non-commercial site). With over 200,000 active installs and top ratings with over 5,000 reviews, "Social Media Share Buttons Popup & Pop Up Social Sharing Icons" is very popular and loved.
Blog2Social: Social Media Auto Post & Scheduler
- Development: Blog2Social, Adenion
- Active installations: over 70,000
- Ratings: 4.5 out of 5 stars from over 1,300 reviews
The Blog2Social: Social Media Auto Post & Scheduler plugin is aimed more at anyone who likes to write and blog a lot. Anyone who runs a thriving blog knows that the targeted distribution of blog posts with the right individual approach to the target group in each network can be time-consuming. It's not for nothing that large blogs employ their own staff for social media management. The tool would like to take some of the work off your hands.
The plugin promises automated sharing of posts with customizable cross-posts for each major network. This alone is a time saver, as you don't have to open each network individually for each post. You can simply write and publish the posts for the networks directly within your WordPress site.
The free version includes the networks Facebook (profiles and pages, but no groups), Twitter, LinkedIn profiles, Xing profiles, Pinterest, Instagram (only personal profiles, no business profiles) and some smaller networks.
If you need more than that, you have to go for the premium version. This is available in three different versions for 69, 99 and 249 US dollars per year. This not only includes more networks, but also the option of scheduling posts in advance (ideal for vacations, for example), automatically sharing posts via RSS feed and using a team calendar.
In short: If you want to run social media management more professionally, the premium version of "Blog2Social: Social Media Auto Post & Scheduler" is a suitable solution. The plugin is currently running on 70,000 WordPress instances - and seems to be running pretty smoothly, as the 4.5 out of 5 stars with over 1,300 ratings show.
How good is a WordPress plugin really?
Revive Old Posts - Social Media Auto Post and Scheduling Plugin
- Development: revive.social
- Active installations: over 40,000
- Ratings: 4 out of 5 stars from over 400 reviews
The Revive Old Posts - Social Media Auto Post and Scheduling plugin follows a similar approach. However, the focus here is even more on not letting old blog posts disappear into digital nirvana, but rather making them visible again on a regular basis. This solves a well-known problem for bloggers: You write high-quality content, share it, get your "five minutes of fame" on social networks in return. And then the post eventually disappears into the archive and is never seen again - except perhaps via Google, Bing or sustainable search engines such as Ecosia.
With this plugin, you can set how often new and old articles should be pushed to your social media channels. Unfortunately, you will need the premium version very early on if you want to achieve more. This is because the free version only includes Twitter and Facebook as well as a few options. The paid version, on the other hand, comes with a lot of power and costs between 75 euros and 299 euros per year.
If you run a large, content-heavy blog or magazine, you should test the free version in advance. The social media plugin currently runs on over 40,000 WordPress projects and has 4 out of 5 stars with over 400 ratings.
Yoast SEO
- Development: Yoast Team
- Active installations: over 5 million
- Ratings: 5 out of 5 stars with over 27,000 ratings
The Yoast SEO plugin may seem a little surprising in this list. But the most popular and best-known WordPress SEO plugin in the world can actually do something for your social media presence. We won't go into the extensive SEO functions here, as these are of course on top. See our comparison with Rank Math, so we will only focus on the social media component.
First of all, you can specify your social media profiles in Yoast SEO. This helps search engines to understand which social media channels belong to your website. You can also use Yoast SEO to ensure that social networks such as Facebook or Twitter pull all relevant information when sharing posts and display the posts correctly (for example, the correct images). This is called "Open Graph Meta Data".
If you have a Pinterest profile, you can also verify it with Yoast SEO. All you have to do is enter the meta tag that Pinterest displays during verification in the plugin settings. Yoast SEO will then take care of the rest. In addition to these settings, Yoast SEO also helps you to customize the social media posts for Facebook and Twitter for each post.
You can customize these within the SEO box below a blog post if you wish and thus display a different title on Facebook than on Twitter, for example. This allows you to optimize your articles even better for the individual networks. Yoast SEO is available in a free version, which is completely sufficient for 80 percent of all users. 5 million active installations and top marks from 27,000 reviewers speak for themselves.
Social Media Follow Buttons Bar
- Development: Space X-Chimp
- Active installations: over 20,000
- Ratings: 5 out of 5 stars with 30 ratings
Of course, in addition to sharing posts, you also want to draw attention to your social media channels in a visually appealing way. If your WordPress theme doesn't offer a suitable solution, there are countless plugins for precisely this purpose. One of them is Social Media Follow Buttons Bar. It allows you to build buttons for 127 social media platforms and display them anywhere on your WordPress pages using shortcodes.
As is now the case almost everywhere, this plugin also comes with a free version, which should normally be sufficient. And with a premium version that you can buy for 29, 69 or 199 US dollars. This allows you to create multiple shortcodes, for example, if you want to display different channels in different places. The plugin runs on over 20,000 instances and has received top marks from users so far, albeit with only 30 ratings. So you'll have to test it yourself.
Conclusion: Social media plugins make it easier for you
Social media is part and parcel of life these days - there's no changing that. But: With one or two plugins, the effort required to operate social media channels professionally can be significantly minimized. Before using such plugins, however, you should always check whether your WordPress theme already offers the desired functions. In particular, plugins for displaying social media sharing buttons or buttons that link to your channels are often superfluous if these functions already come with your theme.
You should also always check every plugin for compliance with the GDPR. Make sure that no user data is transferred to social networks unintentionally. For example, if you integrate the networks' interactive buttons directly. And that the plugins themselves do not log any personal data. Ideally, you should clarify these points with a law firm specializing in online law and data protection to prevent warnings.
