Make a Weblog

1.  AddThis

With over a billion unique users, AddThis is the world’s largest social Sharing tools and analytics provider for any website, not just WordPress. It help maximize the distribution of your content, by integrating with over 330 of the most popular social networking and bookmarking sites.

AddThis offers so many customization options and provides social analytics to track how your content being shared across social networks. Analytics are available in real time. It also includes automatic translation into more than 70 languages.

Integrating AddThis sharing tools into your WordPress blog is easy, and can be done either by installing a plugin or using a piece of code.

WordPress.org plugins

URL Shortener

Price: Free.

2.  Shareaholic | share buttons & related posts

Formerly known as Sexy bookmarks, Shareaholic is a more stylized social sharing plugin on the list. The plugin offers four different styles of sharing buttons to choose from: Classic, Flat square, Flat circle, and Sexy.

The best part about Shareaholic is that it is highly customizable. You can adjust the position, layout, size and alignment of the button. You can also display the share count for a share button to highlight how many times the URL has been shared. It provides reports on your sharing activity, such as how your content is performing, who’s sharing it, and through which channels.

Also, it comes with Recommendations and Related posts options to increase user engagement and time on your site.

Button Placements:

• Top of the Post.
• Bottom of the Post.
• Floating bar on the left side of the content.

URL Shortener

Note that this setting will only shorten links for services where it is appropriate (i.e. sharing to Twitter and Facebook, but not bookmarking in Google Bookmarks or Delicious).

Price: Free.

3.  Flare Lite

Are you looking for the share buttons that capture the visitor’s attention and make them want to click on it? Then this plugin is for you!

Flare is famed for its elegant social sharing bar that brings a minimal and unobtrusive design to your social media buttons.

The floating bar suddenly appears at the left side of your content, staying visible as your visitors scroll down your page. You have complete control over coloring and style of these share buttons.

Flare allows your visitors to share your content to 10 social services – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, StumbleUpon, Pinterest, Reddit, Buffer, Hacker news and most importantly Email.

Button Placements:

• Top of the Post.
• Bottom of the Post.
• Floating bar on the left side of the content.

URL Shortener

Note: The Flare plugin in WordPress.org directory is longer maintained by developers, you’ll need to sign up for a free Filament account to use a hosted app version of Flare. Don’t worry. It works with virtually any website or CMS, including WordPress.

Price: Free.

4.  Monarch

Monarch is a great premium social sharing plugin created by the team at Elegant Themes.

This plugin boasts some impressive features and allows you to display share counts after they reach a certain number.

In addition you can display social icons in your sidebar or other widget areas and you can monitor social shares in an impressive looking interface.

There are also several placement options which include triggered popups and fly ins which are designed to engage visitors.

The plugin is well optimized and built with speed in mind but it still has all the important features you will need to encourage social shares.

• Support for popular social networks.
• Multiple display options.
• Choose when share counts are displayed.
• Easy to use interface.
• Popover and fly in share boxes to encourage sharing.
• Display social media icons in widgets or with shortcode.
• Track social shares, likes and follows with built in statistics.

5. Ultimate Social Deux

Ultimate Social Deux is a premium social sharing plugin plugin created by the team at CodeCanyon. Unlike most WordPress social haring plugins, Ultimate Social Deux won’t slow your site down because it uses lightweight Javascript and CSS to load the buttons quickly. The plugin was designed with speed in mind.

Available for $12, this plugin is perfect for those who are looking for a customizable, easy-to-use, light-weight WordPress social sharing plugin. With its sleek, stylish aesthetics, numerous customization options and user friendly interface, this social sharing plugin is a definite standout. A powerful and highly customizable, yet light plugin.

The plugin supports 10 popular custom styled social media buttons with share counters. Go ahead and try it. You won’t be disappointed with Ultimate Social Deux.

Button Placements:

• Top of the Post.
• Bottom of the Post.
• Floating bar on the left side of the content.

URL Shortener

Price: $14.

6. Simple share buttons adder

Simple Share Buttons Adder, as the name implies, is a simple social sharing plugin that enables you to add share buttons to all of your posts and/or pages. This plugin also comes packed with extra configuration options to customize the button that you can see in this video tutorial.

The plugin has been downloaded more than 365,000 times and has an impressive 4.8 out of 5 star rating from users. That’s a lot of happy users.

Button Placements:

• Top of the Post.
• Bottom of the Post.

URL Shortener

Price: Free.

7.  Share Buttons by AddToAny

With over 3 million downloads, AddToAny is without a doubt the best social sharing plugin for WordPress. The plugin allow visitors to share, bookmark, and email your content using any service, such as Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Google, Reddit, Tumblr, StumbleUpon, LinkedIn, and well over 100 more sharing and social bookmarking sites.

The plugin also include 3rd party buttons like Facebook Like Button, Twitter Tweet Button, Pinterest Pin It Button, Google+ Share Button and Google +1 Button.

AddToAny’s customizable platform and universal share button let you optimize your site’s blog posts for the best social sharing engagement. The plugin has Google Analytics integration to provide sharing statistics within your analytics dashboard.

Button Placements:

• Top of the Post.
• Bottom of the Post.
• Floating share bar on the left side of the post.

URL Shortener

Price: Free.

8. Share Buttons Mashshare

Inspired by the popular website Mashable, Mashshare Share Buttons add mashable look like share buttons at the top and bottom of your posts. The buttons are quite nicely styled that can also be placed manually anywhere in pages or posts using a shortcode.

For now the plugin shows only the total share counts with buttons of Facebook and Twitter at a glance, but you can get an add-on which can get you a few more social networks such as Google Plus, Pinterest, LinkedIn and StumbleUpon.

Button Placements:

• Top of the Post.
• Bottom of the Post.

URL Shortener

Price: Free.

9.  Digg Digg

Developed by the team at Buffer and used by sites such as Mashable, Digg Digg is one of the most popular and and feature-rich social sharing plugins available for WordPress. The plugin supports all popular social sharing buttons with counters. However, Digg Digg supports lazy loading to increase your website performance by delaying the load of social Buttons.

Button Placements:

• Top of the Post.
• Bottom of the Post.
• Floating bar on the left side of the post.

URL Shortener

Price: Free.

10.  Socialize

With Socialize, you can selectively display actionable social sharing buttons in two places on your post – inside the content  (aligned right or left) and in a ‘call to action’ box below the post. Not only does this allow your visitors to share your content, it also encourages your readers to leave a comment and subscribe to your blog as well.  Great plugin to increase engagement, sharing and relationship building for your website .

Socialize offers 12 popular sharing buttons and gives you great control over how your buttons are displayed.

Button Placements:

• Bottom of the Post (in a ‘call to action’ box).
• Floating bar on the left side of the post.

URL Shortener

Price: Free.

11.  Floating Social Bar

Floating social bar, developed by Syed Balkhi of WPBeginner,  is a light-weight social share plugin that adds a horizontal floating share bar at the top of your page. The plugin is extremely easy to set up and configure, anyone can do it.

Despite providing a great amount of social share buttons and configuration options, the developers of Floating social bar have designed it a priority not to impact the speed of your site. The plugin supports only top social networks like Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, and Pinterest.

URL Shortener

Price: Free.

12. DC Simple Share Buttons

DC Simple Share Buttons is simple, light-weight social sharing plugin that adds a stylish social media buttons to the end of your blog posts. The buttons load pretty fast as they do not rely on external resources to load, it’s written in PHP, HTML and CSS (no javascript, no images).

The plugin supports Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Reddit, LinkedIn, and Pinterest. The plugin also supports shortcode which you can use to put the buttons anywhere in your template.

Button Placement:

• Bottom of the post.

URL Shortener

Price: Free.

13.  Slick Social Buttons

Slick Social Buttons is one of the most popular social plugins that adds social media buttons to your WordPress website in either a floating or sliding panel. The bar can be displayed either vertically or horizontally. You can also control the floating speed and sliding speed of share bar.

The plugin offers Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, StumbleUpon, Digg, delicious, reddit, buffer and Pinterest buttons. It supports shortcode, and includes a social analytics dashboard within your admin area to see what post is getting the most shares.

URL Shortener

Price: Free.

Now, over to you – Which one is your favorite? If you have a favorite plugin that isn’t listed here, please let me know in the comments below.  

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