30 best social media plugins for your website

The 30 Best Social Media Plugins for WordPress Blogs and Websites in 2024

Explore 30 best social media plugins to connect your blog or website to your social sphere and help you to get more followers, likes, shares, and drive more traffic to your blog or website.

Social media networks are the most important sources to drive traffic to your blog. In order to drive more readers to and from your social media channels, share your posts and content regularly on your social feeds and also in your communities. Once your readers visit your site, you need to hook them to your site and to your social media channels, encourage them to share your posts and images, and regularly drive them back to your site. For all these tasks, you might need some smart tools to help you.

Social media plugins will assist you by integrating some smart features directly into your WordPress website.  However, there are tons of options to choose from. There are plugins for enabling your readers to follow your social streams, to like, share, pin, and comment on your posts, and others to schedule and share your posts on all your social media accounts.

What kind of social media plugins do you need?

Social media plugins will connect your website with the social media world. Most importantly, social media follow and share icons and buttons make it easy for your readers to follow, like, share and comment. This will make it easy and encourage visitors to follow you and share your content.

Social media automation will save much time for scheduling and sharing your posts. However, when choosing social media automation, make sure you use tools that allow you to cross-promote by tailoring your social media posts for your communities to make them look like a human and not like a robot.

Besides these 3 basic plugins, there are several more nice-to-have features that will help you to connect your website and your social media channels. For example, by displaying social media streams and social discussions.

We have structured our list into the following plugin categories with some key features these plugins can offer:

  1. Social Follow Icons: By adding social icons with links to your social media profiles, visitors can easily find and follow you outside of your website. This is particularly important for building an engaged following and strengthening your brand.
  2. Social Sharing Buttons: These small buttons allow visitors to share interesting content directly from your website to their own social media profiles. This not only boosts the reach of your content but also drives more traffic to your website.
  3. Social Feeds and Widgets: By integrating social feeds, visitors can see your latest social media content directly on your website. This keeps them updated on your activities and encourages interaction.
  4. Social Media Automation: A social media automation tool allows you to automatically schedule and share your website content on various social media platforms. This saves time and ensures that your content is continuously shared to maximize your reach.
  5. Social Locker: If provide give-aways on your site, like downloadable checklists or whitepapers, you can use a social locker to make your visitors “pay” with a social action, like a share, follow or like to get more engagement and endorsement for your content. This is an effective method for increasing the reach of your content and gaining more followers.
  6. Social Login: A social login allows users to sign in to your website using their social media accounts. This not only enhances usability but also minimizes spam and improves security.
  7. Social Comments: Integrating social comments allows users to publish comments using their social media profiles. This encourages interaction between users and enhances the sense of community on your website.
7 Essential Social Media Plugins for Your Website
7 Essential Social Media Plugins for Your Website

In this blog post you will find the best choices for each of the category, with some alternatives to look at. Most of them offer a free basic service, some of them are paid or offer paid premium features, but they are worth the money for the value you will get.

The very best social media plugins for your blog or website

1. The best WordPress plugins for social media follow buttons

First of all, you need social media buttons on your site. Your website visitors are your most likely fans. Once you get people to visit your blog or website, you need to hook them to your site. You can do this by asking them to subscribe to your blog or newsletter, but many people are reluctant to leave their e-mail addresses these days. Turning website visitors into social media followers is the best way to keep them updated and make them return to your site.

Make it easy for them to follow your social media sites. Placing social media follow buttons visibly on your website will help you increase the number of followers on your social profiles. Most important places are the top header and the footer of your website. You can also opt for floating bars or site bars.

Best choice: Superb Media Share Buttons & Social Sharing Icons (free & premium)

The Superb Social Media Share and Follow Buttons plugin ist simple and straightforward. It offers access to over 25 social networks, with convenient icon and button shortcodes. It’s GDPR compliant, lightweight, and responsive, designed to boost traffic and facilitate easy sharing on WordPress sites. Compatible with popular plugins like WooCommerce and Elementor, it seamlessly integrates with various website functionalities. With recognizable icons optimized for SEO and sleek button design for high conversion rates, it’s an effective tool for engaging audiences.

Alternative plugins for social media share buttons

  • Monarch (ElegantThemes membership bundle at $ 89 including 87 premium themes and six premium plugins)
    Offers elegant looking 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 floating bars, image icons and automatic pop-up and fly-in triggers.
  • Shareholic (free & premium)
    Shareaholic is a versatile WordPress social media plugin that allows you to easily add floating, content-related, and individual image share buttons, as well as social follow buttons, with detailed settings for each placement, including share counts activation and specific social network selection. It boasts minimal impact on page load time, adding only 14 milliseconds according to tests, and offers over 100 free social integrations, including WeChat and WhatsApp. With advanced controls for audience-specific content, GDPR-compliant privacy features, and official Google Analytics partnership, Shareaholic provides comprehensive solutions for social sharing needs, along with options for share count recovery, optional monetization, and a built-in URL shortener.

2. The best WordPress plugins for social media share buttons

Next, you need social media share buttons on your site to encourage your website visitors to share your content. There are practically hundreds of plugins for social share buttons to choose from. Hardly any other function for WordPress offers more choices for plugins than social media share buttons.

Best choice: Social Media Share Buttons & Social Sharing Icons (free & premium)

Social Media Share Buttons Plugin
Social Share Buttons & Social Sharing Icons

With more than 200.000+ active Installations and more than 4,463 5-star the Social Media Share Buttons & Social Sharing Icons is one of the most popular social share icon plugins. You get 16 stylish design styles for your social share buttons for Facebook, YouTube, Pinterest, LinkedIn, RSS in the free, and more networks in the premium version. Place the share buttons before or after posts, floating, via widget or shortcode, or define the location on the page. Define several actions to one share buttons, add animation or counts. The premium version offers additional advanced features such as click tracking, and sharing statistics.

Alternative plugins for social media share buttons

  • Super Socializer- WordPress Social Share, Social Login and Social Comments Plugin (free & premium)
    Integrates fully responsive social share buttons from more than 100 social networks and social counts for Facebook, Linkedin, X (Twitter), Buffer, Reddit, Pinterest, Stumbleupon, and Vkontakte, with multiple free customization options for size, shape, background and 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 checkout pages and customer login forms and social comments for Facebook Comments, Google Plus Comments, Disqus Comments.
  • Custom Share Buttons with Floating Sidebar (free & premium)
    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. Floating bars for mobile devices are available with the Pro version as well as many other options.
  • Social Media Share Buttons | MashShare (free & premium)
    Highly customizable without any impact on page speed, because the plugin works without any external script dependencies. The free version supports Facebook and X (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 offer a wide variety of options, including more networks, analytics, side, bars, widgets, floating bars and many more options.
  • Social Warfare (free & premium)
    Displays visually stunning sharing buttons in a variety of locations on your blog without slowing down your site. You can add share buttons above/below your posts or via shortcode, floating share bars and share counts. The premium option offers more networks for sharing, fully customizable share texts and many more.
  • Hubbub Lite (free & premium)
    Hubbub Lite is one of the easiest-to-use social sharing button plugins available, adding personalized sharing buttons for a wide variety of social networking platforms to your website. It allows for easy addition of sharing buttons to multiple locations on your webpages using Hubbub Lite’s Floating Sidebar and Inline Content Bar tools. Hubbub Lite includes four major social media platforms: Facebook, Twitter / X, Pinterest, and LinkedIn. Hubbub Pro offers an additional 17+ social networks and many extra features, including additional toolbars, numerous options for sharing to Pinterest, and more.
  • Social Snap is a versatile plugin compatible with over 30 social networks and apps, including Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, WhatsApp, Telegram, and more. Its customizable social share buttons can be placed anywhere on your website. Notable features include displaying social follower counts, automatically publishing new posts on social media, reviving old content through automatic reposting, offering social logins for website visitors, implementing Click-to-Tweet buttons, and incorporating meta-tags for social media. Social Snap even offers advanced statistics and reports to track audience interaction with your content.

3. The best WordPress plugins for social media feeds

In addition to general social sharing buttons on your posts and site, you can encourage users to engage with your social media content directly on your website by integrating and displaying your social media feeds on your website. Social media follow buttons are important means to turn your website visitors into followers. However, for new visitors, they might feel like buying a “pig in a poke” because they don’t know what to expect from your social media updates.

Social feeds are an easy way to share your social updates on your site to attract your website visitors to your social media accounts. You can do this by implementing social feed widgets for each of your networks into your sidebar or your content. However, if you manage multiple social networks, your sidebar might burst with a whole bunch of widgets. You have to choose due to lack of space for too many widgets on your sidebar.

Utilizing a social media feed plugin on your website offers multiple benefits, including enhanced engagement through dynamic, real-time content, increased visibility by extending reach beyond individual platforms, and the reinforcement of brand identity across online channels. Moreover, integrating social media feeds automates content updates, saving time and ensuring website freshness, while also fostering user interaction and community building through sharing and engagement features. Overall, a social media feed plugin enriches website content, improves user experience, and strengthens online presence in a cohesive and efficient manner.

A social wall combining multiple social feeds can be a better alternative for your blog to show off all of your updates and contents in a single lifestream. Social feed plugins collect, optimize and present your entire variety of content from social platforms in a more organized manner. It displays your status updates along with items that you’ve shared like links, images, and videos. Some social feeds plugins even display your social engagement with your followers.

Best choice: Smash Balloon

Smash Ballon Photo Feed
Smash Ballon Photo Feed

If you are opting for Instagram only, Smash Balloon allows you to beautifully display your recent Instagram photos on your WordPress website. You will need to generate an Instagram access token. You can then use the available shortcodes to display the feed anywhere on your site including posts, pages, or sidebar widgets, as well as create multiple feeds for multiple Instagram accounts by customizing shortcode parameters. Other Plugins from Smash Ballon provide features for Facebook Feeds, Twitter Feeds and YouTube Feeds.

Alternative social media feed plugins

  • Feed Them Social (free & premium)
    Create Social Feeds of any or all your photos and videos from Facebook Pages, Groups, Album Photos, Album Covers or Events from Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Vine, Pinterest, etc. 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!
  • Flow Flow Social Streams (free & premium)
    Aggregate and stream social feeds in a customizable responsive social media wall on your WordPress website. You can select any combinations of social feeds from multiple accounts, connected with the same single stream. Your website visitors will be able to observe all of your latest network updates in one social flow without slowing down your site. You can display social media counters like comments, likes, views and sharing buttons to increase user engagement, users can sort and search networks on top of your stream.The admin settings provide a drag & drop card builder or you create your own grid style.
  • Social Stream Designer (premium)
    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. This plugin contains 6 astonishing layout styles to showcase the social media feed in an appealing format. Moreover, the Social Stream Designer contains fancy box interaction that makes social stream feeds more engaging. It has 40+ options available in layout settings to customize the look & feel of social feeds. It also allows users to get the latest feeds by auto-refreshing API. It is a translation-ready and fully responsive plugin that is compatible with all devices.

4. The best WordPress plugins for social media automation 

Don’t wait for other people to share your content. Use every opportunity the social media world provides for sharing and promoting your content yourself. Cross-promoting your post on multiple social networks will help you to drive a consistent stream of traffic to your site. There are many social platforms, special groups, and communities, where you can share your posts. Sharing your content manually every time you publish a new post can become quite tiresome and time-consuming, especially if you publish regularly. Social media automation plugins can help you to automatically share your post, whenever you publish a new blog post to save time and work. There are multiple choices for tools and plugins for auto-publishing your posts. However, social media automation can boost or bust your valuable work, if done wrong. Don’t just shoot and forget. Careless automation can turn your social media accounts into a lifeless robotic content stream.

Each social network offers different options for presenting your content. Each network is used for different purposes and at different times. And, the communities react differently to post formats or post frequency. Hashtags work fine for X (Twitter) and Instagram, but they perform less on Facebook and LinkedIn. On Facebook short comments perform better. You may also need to address your LinkedIn business contacts differently than your Facebook friends.

To effectively cross-promote your content, don’t just cross-post 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.

Best choice: Blog2Social (free & premium) – schedule and share your blog posts to social media

Smart Social Media Automation with Blog2Social
Blog2Social Social Media Automation: schedule and share your content automatically on your social media accounts

Blog2Social is a very powerful dashboard application for WordPress with a whole bunch of options to schedule, share and cross-promote your blog posts across multiple social media channels at once. The plugin allows you to auto-post and to customize your posts individually, and to schedule your posts for the best times on each network.

Blog2Social supports more than 20 popular social networks, such as Facebook, X (Twitter), LinkedIn , Instagram, Pinterest, Telegram, Bluesky, Mastodon, Discord, XING, Flickr, Tumblr, Medium, Torial, Reddit, Bloglovin, Diigo, Revelry, VK.com and more for auto-publishing your WordPress content as well as social media post from any source.

The plugin automatically turns your blog posts into an adapted format for each network with pre-filled comments and hashtags. You can edit all social media posts with individual comments, hashtags, handles or emojis, select specific images for your posts, choose link post or image post formats, define Facebook OG and Twitter and many more.

The premium version provides more options for scheduling and sharing your post with custom formats.

A social media calendar allows you to keep track of your scheduled posts and re-arrange or add scheduled posts per drag-drop. You can schedule your posts for one-time or multiple-time postings or schedule your evergreen content recurrently for up to one year in advance.

You may also re-post your old post and pre-schedule your scheduled post for auto-posting.

This plugin really saves a lot of time and legwork every time you publish a new post and helps you to get more outreach for your post in less time. It helps you to create human-looking, 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

Alternative WordPress Plugins for social media automation:

  • Facebook Auto Publish (free)
    Lets you publish posts automatically from your blog to Facebook. You can publish your posts to Facebook as a simple text message, a text message with an image or as an attached link to your blog. The plugin supports filtering posts based on custom post-types as well as categories.
  • WP LinkedIn Auto Publish (free)
    Lets you publish posts, custom posts and pages automatically from WordPress to your personal LinkedIn profile or your LinkedIn 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, filter items to be published based on categories or post formats, but posts cannot be scheduled.
  • JetPack (free & premium)
    A simple automatic sharing on Tumblr, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Mastodon und Nextdoor is integrated with the JetPack plugin package which also provides you with several other free and paid tools for your site, like subscription and contact forms, security features and widgets, site stats and analytics, and more. It provides auto-posting, but no customizing or scheduling.

5. The best social media plugins for social locker

Social Locker Plugins offer an effective way to encourage interaction with your content while boosting engagement on social media platforms. By hiding certain content such as e-books, checklists, or exclusive offers behind a “pay with a social act” barrier, they encourage visitors to share, follow, or like your content to gain access. In doing so, they allow you to achieve organic reach, expand your follower base, and enhance your brand visibility. Social Locker Plugins are a savvy strategy to leverage the benefits of social media while offering valuable content that your visitors appreciate.

An example of using a Social Locker plugin would be offering an e-book or checklist on your website and granting access to it only when the visitor shares your post on Facebook or follows your Instagram page. This way, you not only receive organic social media promotion but also build your online community and increase your follower count.

Best choice: Social Share Locker Pro

Social_Share_Locker_Pro
Social Share Locker Pro

Social Share & Locker Pro is a social locker WordPress plugin with numerous social sharing functionalities aimed at maximizing social shares and generating more social traffic. The Social Locker integration offers a powerful tool to boost content sharing and drive traffic from major social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and LinkedIn. With features such as Delay Time and AutoUnlock, the Social Locker becomes a versatile component of your social strategy, allowing you to control access to content based on various criteria. Smart Targeting options enable you to convert visitors into leads by targeting specific user statuses, comments, WordPress roles, referral sources, and device types. This dynamic functionality enhances engagement and encourages social sharing, ultimately expanding your online reach and audience interaction. For beginners, the social locker plugin is compatible with over 44 social networks, including popular platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Its pros include responsive social themes, a Social Share ShortCode generator, CSS3 hover effects, and integration with Visual Composer.

Alternative WordPress plugins for social lockers:

  • Social Media Content Locker (premium)
    The Social Media Content Locker plugin assists in enhancing your online presence by encouraging likes, shares, and subscriptions to your social media channels. Additionally, the plugin aids in expanding your subscriber list, promoting products, and boosting registered members and video views by prompting users to watch a video before accessing the content. Its advantages include unlimited lockers, Mailchimp integration, and easy customization options.
  • RafflePress (free & premium)
    Raffle Press is a powerful WordPress plugin designed to drive traffic, grow email lists, and enhance social media engagement through viral giveaways and contests. With its user-friendly drag-and-drop interface and pre-built actions for sharing and liking on popular social networks like Facebook and X/Twitter, setting up campaigns is effortless. Users enter giveaways with their email addresses, encouraging list growth, and are incentivized to share for more entries, thus boosting engagement and traffic. RafflePress also offers social logins for easy entry, fraud detection for security, and seamless email marketing integrations. It is mobile responsiveness, SEO-friendy, and optimized for speed load.

6. The best social media plugins for social logins

Social login plugins are valuable tools used to streamline the user registration and login process on websites by allowing users to sign in using their existing social media accounts. These plugins offer convenience and efficiency by eliminating the need for users to create new accounts and remember additional login credentials. With social login, users can simply click on a social media button, such as Facebook, Twitter, or Google, to authenticate themselves and gain access to the website’s features. This not only reduces friction during the login process but also helps websites collect valuable user data from social media profiles, which can be used for personalized marketing and targeted advertising. These plugins are highly recommended if you are looking to improve user experience, increase registration rates, and leverage social media data for marketing purposes. A social login feature streamlines social media integration and management, making it an essential tool for any WordPress website looking to boost engagement and traffic.

Best choice: Nextend Social Login and Register (free & premium)

Nextend Social Login
Nextend Social Login

Nextend Social Login and Register is a powerful freemium plugin that empowers users to create profiles or log in using their Facebook, Google, or X (formerly Twitter) accounts, eliminating the need for waiting on confirmation emails. With over 300,000 active installations and a stellar 4.9 rating on WordPress, Nextend offers essential features such as configurable redirection, login widgets, and shortcode compatibility.

The free version provides basic functionality such as the integration of Facebook and X/Twitter, the pro version offers expanded social media integrations, including LinkedIn, Amazon, Yahoo, TikTok, and Slack. Additionally, users can connect their profiles with social media and display profile pictures as avatars.

Alternative WordPress plugins for social logins:

  • Heater Social Login Plugins
    The features of the Heater Social Login Plugins include integration of over 25 different social media platforms for login and registration, catering to a variety of user preferences. The plugin is GDPR-compliant and compatible with the Gutenberg editor as well as WPML for multilingual websites. It syncs users’ basic social profile data with their WordPress and WooCommerce profiles and enables social login activation on WooCommerce checkout pages and customer login forms. Additionally, it offers customization options for post-registration redirection, widgets, and shortcodes, along with compatibility with BuddyPress, BBPress, and multisite installations as well as HTTPS-support.
  • WP Social
    WP Social is a comprehensive social media plugin for WordPress that combines social login, social counter, and social share functionalities into one robust tool. It simplifies the process of integrating social media features into your website, eliminating the need for multiple plugins. With WP Social, visitors can easily log in using their social accounts and share content across various platforms. The plugin supports nine social login providers, including Facebook, Google, Twitter, LinkedIn, and more. Additionally, it offers customizable login redirect URLs and options to show or hide social login buttons on different pages.
  • WordPress Social Login Plugin
    The WordPress Social Login Plugin simplifies user registration and login processes by allowing visitors to use their social media profiles, including Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Twitter, and more. It integrates seamlessly with popular plugins like WooCommerce and BuddyPress, offering flexible display options and customizable login button designs. The plugin ensures secure login through protocols like OAuth and OpenID, while also offering features like user redirection, role assignment, and email notifications. Additionally, it supports social sharing and commenting, with user-friendly UI.

7. The best social media plugins for social comments

Social media plugins for social comments allow your visitors to log in with their social media credentials in order to comment on your posts. The comments appear both on your site and on social media streams. This can help to expand the reach of your site and increase overall engagement.

Best choice: wpDiscuz (free & premium)

wpDiscuz WordPress plugin
The real-time comment system wpDiscuz

The wpDiscus plugin is a fully customizable real-time comment system, with a lot of great features.The plugin uses the WordPress comment system with all managing functions and features, secure and anti-spam features. Fast loading and responsive system based on AJAX. Allows lazy load on scrolling or AJAX “Load more” buttons.

The plugin provides forms and fields for native WordPress comments that will be kept in your database. Adds interactive comment box on posts and other content types.

Commenting can be allowed/disallowed on posts and other content types. Comment lists can be sorted by newest, oldest and most voted comments.

The plugin fully integrates with social network login plugins to log in to their Facebook, Twitter or WP credentials.

The plugin allows admins and users to create a new discussion thread and reply to existing comments and to edit comments. It provides multi-level (nested) comment threads, with many setting options and custom comment forms with custom fields.

Allows shortcode for rating and voting posts via comment custom field [wpdrating] with a lot of attributes.

Alternative WordPress plugins for social comments:

  • Jetpack Comments (free & premium)
    If you are using Jetpack you can replace the default WordPress comments with the Jetpack Comments module, that has an integrated social login ability. It’s easy to use for your visitors.
  • Super Socializer (free & premium)
    The social sharing buttons plugin also includes a module to enable users to comment on your website using their Social Media credentials, such as Facebook, Google or Disqus accounts. The comment shows up on your blog as well as on in their news feed. Users profile data and email addresses are saved in your database for easier communication.
  • Social (Facebook) comments WordPress (free & premium)
    If you are opting just for Facebook integration, the Facebook comments WordPress plugin is great. Visitors can log in with their Facebook accounts to leave comments. You can also import the Facebook Comments box to your website and customize designs to your liking.

Wrap-up

We hope you enjoyed our list of essential social media plugins for your WordPress-Website.

As you can see, using the right plugins for your WordPress blog or WordPress website can facilitate your social media workload immensely. You will further generate more traffic and engagement on your networks and make your content more visible. 

Your favorite plugins didn’t make the list? Feel free to tell us which other top WordPress plugins deserve to be included here. Are you a developer yourself? Go ahead and introduce yourself and your plugin. We are looking forward to your comments and emails.

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About the author

Melanie Tamblé

Melanie Tamblé is co-founder and co-CEO of Adenion GmbH. She is an experienced expert in content marketing and social media. Adenion GmbH specializes in online services and tools for bloggers, businesses and agencies of any size to support their online marketing and content seeding tasks on the web. Blog2Social as WordPress Plugin and WebApp enable fast and easy auto-posting, scheduling and cross-promotion of blog posts, articles, links, images, videos and documents across multiple social media sites. Social media posts will be automatically turned into a customized format for each social platform and auto-scheduled for the best time. Social media post can be previewed and tailored with individual post formats, images or personal comments - all in one easy step.

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