Social media is necessary for modern-day marketing. Using it can easily double your website’s traffic – that’s why you want to customize your icons to fit your needs. There’s no need to pay for something that you can get for free, so here are 5 plugins that will dramatically improve the social media icons on your site.
1.) Social Media and Share Icons (Ultimate Social Media)
Ultimate Social Media is one of the most popular plugins for social media icons, averaging about 5,000 downloads a day for the month of February. Ultimate Social Media provides you with links to over 200 social media platforms and offers style, positioning, and functionality that will create serious improvements on your site.
Ultimate Social Media helps you decide whether or not your social media links will be fixed, whether or not they will “pop-up” and allow a user to share, whether or not they will display at the bottom of each post, whether or not they will enable subscription via email, whether or not they will provide animation for icons, and whether or not they will show “counts” for share information (to name some of the features).
This plugin will also take you through a step-by-step process for installation and set-up. Ultimate Social Media has received an average of 4.9 / 5 stars and has been downloaded over 70,000 times, so there isn’t any risk in trying it.
2. Ultimate Social Media Icons (Plus)
The sister plugin of Ultimate Social Media, Ultimate Social Media Icons Plus, provides even more features and makes it even easier for the user. Just like Ultimate Social Media, you can still add icons for over 200 social media platforms. But, with Ultimate Social Media Icons Plus, you can:
– place icons before a post
– place icons next to a post on your homepage
– display the icons before and after a post (not just the standard set)
– have more control over where you place the icons
This plugin currently has 10,000 active installs and an average rating of 4.9/5 stars. You can see its full reviews here, and, like it’s sister product, it’s also offered as a free plugin.
3. Social Media Feather
In terms of active installs, Social Media Feather is the most popular plugin on this list with a total of over 100,000 installations. Social Media Feather has tutorials for the beginner and is the only social media sharing / bookmarking plugin with full support for retina and high resolution displays, such as those that are used in the iPad 5 and other devices.
This plugin is mostly known for its simplicity, performance and unobtrusive effect. In order to achieve a high level of performance, the plugin does not use JavaScript, which in turn helps it run faster while still providing typical social media functions, like professional media share and high quality icons.
Social Media Feather also offers widgets for sharing and following that you can place in a widgetized area within your site, while the widgets expose some settings and the parameters to tweak the appearance of the icons.
The plugin also comes with a default icon set but still allows for the customization of the icons by using social icon skins, which can be customized to create interesting effects like fading or greying out.
Social Media Feather has received an average rating of 4.5/5 stars and again there is no risk because it’s free.
4. Cresta Social Share Counter
Cresta Social Share Counter is a relatively underrated plugin, mostly because of its simplicity. However, its simplicity is also what separates it from its competition. Even though it’s limited in how many platforms it allows, with Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, Linkedin, and Pinterest being the only available options (in the free version), it still provides a client with all of the same features as the plugins I mentioned before, such as:
– different icon styles
– fade animation
– floating social buttons
– the option to display icons before or after content
– a shortcut code to display the icons anywhere on the page
Obviously as you can see from the title, the share count is the most distinguishable aspect of this plugin. The share count shows how many times the content has been shared to each social media platform – this can be very useful in deciding whether or not to display particular icons.
In addition, Cresta Social Share Counter has a responsive Support Team that offers effective solutions. Cresta’s customer satisfaction rate is at 95%.
5. Floating Social Media Icon (Acurax)
The Floating Social Media Icon plugin by Acurax includes the following features: over 20 icon themes, icon size and order alignment, simple configuration, support for widgets, shortcode, and PHP, floating, fast loading time (due to the small number of icons), help documentation, and it has been featured on several plugin review sites.
Another thing that separates this plugin from others is that it offers support for Pinterest and icon size – no other plugins offer this type of support specifically.
As explained in the title, the social media icons float to one side of the page, which creates simple navigation and reminds the user that they’re there without becoming a distraction.
A live demo of this plugin can be found at the developers’ website. You will notice that the icons immediately capture your attention and then float to the side, but these features can be adjusted according to your preferences.
To learn more about some of the best social media plugins that are free of charge, check out these sites:
ModernWpThemes
ShoutMeLoud