Easy Social Share Buttons

UPDATE 30/09/14: There is a new version of this plugin which allows you to control whether the buttons appear at the top or bottom (or both) of your post. To control this go to Appearance > Customize and you’ll find these options. If you find that the buttons disappeared when updating to the new version you can enable them again by checking the required options in the Customize panel.

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We recently released our latest theme, Virality, and bundled with that we offer our own WordPress plugin to add social sharing buttons to your posts. And now you can install this plugin on your own blog, regardless of what theme you use.

The plugin adds social share buttons that look like this…

social share buttons

It is extremely simple. Once installed and activated it adds these very simple and bold share buttons to all posts on your blog. There are no settings or configuration required. It just adds the buttons to the top and bottom of every post.

The buttons themselves trigger a popup to share the content via Facebook or Twitter in the usual way. We don’t add any Facebook meta data to posts as there are already lots of plugins (including our fav WordPress SEO) which add this so no need for us to do the same. Our plugin simply makes it easy for readers to share your content via their favorite social network.

And to be clear, this is different from Facebook “Like” buttons which do not put the content on the users Facebook timeline. Sharing content via our plugin actually places the post right in the users timeline which dramatically increases the chance it will be seen by their friends. This is the same way super popular viral media sites like Upworthy and Viralnova use to drive loads of referral traffic from Facebook in particular.

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We have some ideas on additional features we may add in the future to make it more flexible, but for now it doesn’t what it says in the simplest possible way. You can see it in action on our own site FullStoke.com.

Charlie has been building WordPress themes, reviewing web hosts and utilizing social media since their respective inceptions.

16 thoughts on “Easy Social Share Buttons

  1. hilaire says:

    Hey,

    I would like to add the possibility for people to select where the share will be made on Facebook (on their timeline, on a friend’s timeline, on a group…)

    Do you know how to configure it??

    Thanks for your help!!!

    Hilaire

    1. charles Charles says:

      Hi Hilaire, that is a Facebook function that we don’t control, and it should be visible there in the share window then you click the share button. Try it here on our demo: http://fullstoke.com/connor-fearon/ – click the Share on Facebook button and you’ll see the drop down at the top of that popup window with the options on where to share.

  2. hey there,

    really like your plugin. but i got some issues using the BORDER template. share buttons only appear in blog or articles, but not in galleries or portfolios even if i activated the feature in those categories. got another problem when using the floating button: how can i set these buttons to share the current page i am on on my page, not the entire homepage ? would be great if you could leave a hint

    [email protected]

    thx in advance

    1. charles Charles says:

      Hi Jean Claude, are you using this plugin, https://wordpress.org/plugins/social-share-by-wp-dev-shed/?

      I ask because I am a little confused by your questions. Our plugin doesn’t “float” which mankes me think you might be using someone elses plugin.

  3. Jessica says:

    I reinstalled the plugin on my new site and when I share a post on facebook it doesn’t show the feature image. I tried to facebook debug and even deleted some plugins I though would be interfering and downloaded the plugin wordpress seo and it still doesn’t show the image. Do you have an idea what the problem is?

    1. charles Charles says:

      Hi Jessica, I’m a bit stumped..did you already solve the problem? I tried your latest post and while the featured image didn’t show up on the share page on FB when I checked my newsfeed the featured image was there on my share, looked great. Running that same URL through the FB debugger and the image is there in the OG meta data, so not sure what the problem is. I can say that the plugin purposefully doesn’t touch your meta data which is what powers the share details including title, description and image. The plugin simply adds the button to your site. The meta data which controls the share content is powered by WordPress and/or any other plugins you might be running, such as Yoast’s SEO plugin (which I highly recommend).

      1. Jessica says:

        I haven’t solved the problem yet. I’ve used your theme and this plugin with my other sites and it worked perfectly fine. Still have any idea?

        1. charles Charles says:

          My only suggestion is to work on your meta data. If it has been working on your other sites I’d look at how you are handling meta data on those sites and mimic that here. Are you using a plugin like Yoast’s SEO plugin? Have your edited the header templates in some way on this new site?

        2. Carlos says:

          Hi Jessica / Charles – were you guys able to solve this issue? I’m having the same problem. When I click on Facebook share button, the title and excerpt of the post appears, but no images. Anyway to make the feature image appear too?

          The only changes to the code I’ve done was to add the Google analytics code to the header. I tried in different browsers too. Running on the Virality theme. Please Help!

          1. charles Charles says:

            Hi Carlos, this is not a function of the plugin. What appears in the share is a function of what meta data you have in your header. I recommend using the WordPress SEO plugin which allows you to set Facebook specific meta data values (incl. image). Note that if you have previously shared page then updated the meta data then you need to force FB to flush their cache of your page here: https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/

  4. Greg says:

    How come the newer version of this plugin is not showing up on my site even though its activated?

    1. charles Charles says:

      Hi Greg, if you go to Appearance > Customization you will find options to control whether the buttons appear at the top or bottom (or both) of your post. It’s meant to default to on, but seems in some cases this doesn’t work and it is off by default when updated. Sorry for the inconvenience. I hope the new flexibility is worth the hassle.

  5. John says:

    Hey I really like this plug and been using it for awhile now but I was wondering is there a way I can add the pinterest button with this plugin also with the same style as the facebook and twitter button. That would be helpful

    1. charles Charles says:

      Hi John, that’s not possible without customizing the pplugin sorry. We are thinking of extending this to offer more features including the Pinterest option, but I can’t promise a delivery date. If you need Pinterest then you probably should try some of the other more advanced plugins. Cheers.

  6. Sharif says:

    Thanks for making this available!

    Is it possible to (manually?) disable the second set of buttons (on the bottom of the post) ?

    Much appreciated!

    1. Ryan S says:

      If it’s not available in Plugin settings then CSS is the only friend we can ask, view the source in your theme where it added the share button and before the lists of share button copy the class or ID and then add into CSS like .socialWrapper{ display: none; } or if you’re savvy then you can go into plugin file and remove action or filter for adding sharing right after the content or bottom of the page.

      Hope that helps

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