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18 Mar 2019

10 Best Free Social Media Plugins for WordPress (2019)

Tutorials / 6 Comments

You can spend a great deal on ads and paid marketing, but one of the most priceless and free marketing commodities is sharing on social media. User engagement with your website, blog post articles, and products can have the greatest impact and outreach. This organic influence can help drive traffic and new visitors to your site and hopefully, new customers to your brand.

Social sharing buttons are the best way to make it easier for users to do just that. Providing shortcuts for users to easily share your content will help boost that number, increasing the number of eyes on your company.

In this blog post, we’ve compiled a list of the 10 best and free social media sharing plugins. This will hopefully save you time from filtering through thousands of social share plugins in the WordPress community.

The plugins on this list are based on their unique features, install counts, rating, and how actively the plugin updates seem to be. This may seem like a small detail but having an actively developed plugin is important, especially when WordPress rolls out changes. Whenever WordPress launches a new version, plugins might break, or their codebase might change. Using a plugin that actively updates their codebase to alleviate any issues is a huge plus!

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1. Jetpack

Jetpack is actually a social share plugin by the WordPress company Automattic. It is a core development plugin, so there are plenty of other features available within Jetpack, social media sharing being one of them. They are a very trustworthy plugin to use, with frequent updates available as well. Not to mention, they have 5 million installations and close to a thousand 4 and 5 star reviews. Jetpack seems to be a safe and reliable social sharing plugin.

2. Sassy Social Share

Sassy Social Share offer quite a variety of social sharing features, all for free, including share counts for Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Reddit & Pinterest among others, which can sometimes be a premium addon for other social plugins. There are plenty of icon background colour and logo colour customizations. The only things offered in their premium package have to do with social sharing analytics which some users may not always need.

3. AddToAny

AddToAny is an extremely popular social sharing plugin. It is reportedly the most popular social share plugin at WordPress.org. Upon further inspection, they seem to have very active plugin development, high install counts, and a high rating. They offer over 100 different social networks sharing buttons, including a helpful universal button that lets users pick any network. This may just be your saving grace if you’re a member of a smaller or country-specific social sharing platform.

4. Shared Counts

Shared Counts offers in their free version something other social share plugins only provide in their paid versions: displaying the total share count of your blog post. Many big media sites show share counts, providing insights into how popular or trending one article is over another. This is a great feature to include if you’d like to grow your site. The only thing is that their last update was 10 months ago. Despite this their rating still seems to be high.

5. Social Warfare

Social Warfare claims to offer faster than average loading speeds, which are always a plus in helping your page to rank higher in Google searched. It is available as a free or pro version. However, the free version seems to offer everything you need for the most popular social sharing platforms. But if you need access to more options (like a Reddit share button or displaying twitter share counts) you may need to go with the pro.

6. WordPress to Buffer

Many start-ups use Buffer to execute and schedule their social marketing plans, and now you can use the WordPress to Buffer plugin to save time! While intended for the website owner, the plugin makes it easy to share your social media content by scheduling everything in one place. Schedule your post and your social media share without having to manually publish your blog post. This will streamline your workflow, so you can plan your post while you're travelling.

7. UltimatelySocial

UltimatelySocial provides a great option for those wanting specific social media buttons. They offer specific positioning of their buttons (top left, top centre, top right, etc.) and they provide various styles of buttons, with an easy to use and setup interface. The free version of this plugin allows you access to all the share buttons for all the major social networks. They’re also overwhelmingly highly reviewed and provide frequent updates.

8. WP Social Sharing

Overwhelmed by the many choices? This super simple and lightweight plugin might be the one for you. If all you need is access to the most popular social media content sharing platforms (ie. Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, LinkedIn, Pinterest), WP Social Sharing cuts out the clutter and offers the basics. Easily add, reorder, and customize the share text of your favourite social media networks.

9. Kiwi Social Share

Kiwi Social Share is available with either their free or premium version. They offer an interesting option of displaying your sharing buttons either as a floating bar above/below/left/right side of your page, or above and below your content on the page. Kiwi does a great job of providing social share buttons for the most popular social sharing platforms in the free version, including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Pinterest.

10. MashShare

MashShare was created and based on the heavily popular Mashable site, so if you’ve always been a fan, now you can get similar social share buttons just like them. They boast a high install and update rate. In the free version, MashShare only supports Facebook and Twitter, but allow you to place the social share button above or below your content, or both. Their paid addon allows you to show the share count and provides access to more social sharing platforms.

Final Thoughts

We encourage you to try more than one of the plugins listed above and take it for a test drive. This is the only way you will truly know which is the best fit for you. Don’t forget to consider the placement and style of the sharing buttons or floating bars that you require. Sometimes a site’s social sharing options can overwhelm the reader, leading them to forego the share because it could be cumbersome.

We hope you enjoyed this list, and if you like Top 10 Lists, there are more of them to be had!