Social Media Share Buttons & Social Sharing Icons

Description

Try it out on your free dummy site: Click here => https://tastewp.com/plugins/ultimate-social-media-icons
(this trick works for all plugins – just replace “wordpress” with “tastewp” in the plugin’s WP repo URL)

Social media plugin which let’s you add share icons for RSS, Email, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram, Youtube, ‘Share’ (covering 200+ other social media platforms) and upload custom share icons of your choice.

This free plugin has a lot to offer. Even more can be found in the Premium Plugin, please watch this short video:

See all features of the Premium plugin.

The free social media plugin includes the following features:

• Pick from 16 different designs for your social media share icons
• Give several actions to one social media share icon (e.g. your facebook share icon can lead visitors to your Facebook page, and also give visitors the opportunity to like your page)
• Decide to give your social media icons an animation (e.g. automatic shuffling, mouse-over effects) to make your visitors aware of the share icons, increasing the chance that they follow/share your blog
• Make your social media icons ‘float’ or ‘sticky’
• Allow visitors to subscribe to your blog by Email
• Add ‘counts’ to your social media buttons
• Decide to display a pop-up (on all or only on selected pages) asking people to follow/share you via your social media icons
• Decide to display sharing-buttons and social media icons at the end of every post
• Select from many other customization features for your socialmedia icons!

For GDPR compliance, please have a look at our Social Media GDPR Compliance page.

The social media plugin is very easy to use as it takes you through all the steps:

• Step 1: Choose which social media icons you want to display
• Step 2: Define what actions your social media icons should perform
• Step 3: Pick design & animation options for your social media icons
• Step 4: Add counts to your social media icons (optional)
• Step 5: Select from various other social share options, e.g. make your social media icons ‘float’
• Step 6: Add sharing/linking icons next to each blog post (optional)
• Step 7: Add a customized pop-up asking people to follow or share (optional)
• Step 8: Add a subscription form on your site (optional)

In case of issues or questions please ask in the Support forum.

We hope you enjoy the free social media plugin!

New premium social share plugin

We released a premium social share plugin with many more exciting features:

• Many more social networks supported, including Snapchat share buttons, Whatsapp share buttons, Yummly share buttons, Phone button, Yelp share buttons, Soundcloud share buttons, Skype share buttons Flickr share buttons, Blogger share buttons, Reddit share buttons, Vimeo share buttons, Tumblr share buttons, Xing share buttons, Xhenta, Vkontakte share buttons (VK), Telegram share buttons, Amazon share buttons, Goodreads share buttons, Angies list share buttons, Steam share buttons, Twitch share buttons, Spotify share buttons, Odnoklassniki share buttons (OK), Buffer share buttons, Weibo share buttons, Pocket share buttons, Meneame share buttons, Frype share buttons, LiveJournal share buttons, Patreon share buttons, Dloky share buttons, Discord share buttons, Github share buttons, WordPress buttons, Etsy share buttons, Better Business Bureau share buttons, Digg share buttons, Delicious share buttons, Print share buttons, and many other share buttons!
• More design styles to make your social share icons look really cool & matching the design of your website
• Themed design styles, e.g. if you have a website about cats you can pick from social media logos which look like cats etc.
• Better social sharing and following features, e.g. you can define the Tweet-texts better (e.g. pull the post titles into your Tweets automatically), let people follow you on Facebook directly without leaving your site etc.
• Place the social icons on specific pages, i.e. you can define on which pages the icons to the social media sites should not show
• Position the social icons by anchor and margins, i.e. you can define the margins where your share icons should be displayed (from top/bottom/left/right), and then have them floating, or stick, still visible when user scrolls down or not etc.
• Optimized for mobile – you can define separate selections for your social network icons for mobile
• More functions for email icon, such as Share (by email), Contact you, Link to a certain page etc.
• Social media counters optimized to encourage more social media sharing from your visitors
• More pop up options which contain your social media buttons, e.g. define a limit to how often the pop-up is shown to the same user, show pop-up only when people try to leave your website etc.
• Friendly support in case you’re stuck
• Many more settings and options for your social media network icons

Have a look at the Premium Plugin features

Screenshots

Installation

Extract the zip file and drop the contents into the wp-content/plugins/ directory of your WordPress installation. Then activate the plugin from the plugins page.

Then go to plugin settings page and follow the instructions. After you’re done, go to the Widget area (Appearance >> Widget) and place the widget on your sidebar to display your social sharing icons on your blog.

Note: This plugin requires CURL to be activated/installed on your server (which should be the standard case), and a PHP version of 5.4 or above. If you don’t have it, please contact your hosting provider or server admin.

FAQ

Please also check the more comprehensive FAQ on https://ultimatelysocial.com/faq

.

I face fundamental issues (the plugin doesn’t load etc.)

Please ensure that:

• You’re using the latest version of the plugin(s)
• Your site is running on PHP 5.4 or above
• You have CURL activated (should be activated by default)

If you’re not familiar with those please contact your hosting company or server admin.

Please check if you have browser extensions activated which may conflict with the plugin. Known culprits include:

• Open SEO Stats (Formerly: PageRank Status) in Chrome
• Adblock Plus in Chrome
• Vine in Chrome

Either de-activate those extensions or try it in a different browser.

If the plugin setting’s area looks ‘funny’ after an upgrade then please clear your cache with String+F5 (PC) or Command+R (Mac).

If you get the error message “Are you sure you want to do this? / Please try again” when uploading the socialsharing plugin: Some servers may have a low limits with respect to permitted upload times. Please set the values in the “php.ini” file to:

max_execution_time 90
post_max_size 48M

If you don’t know how to do it, please contact your server support / hosting company for that. Tell them you need it for a social sharing plugin on WordPress which may take longer to upload.

If your issue is still not fixed after you’ve followed the steps above, we can provide support as part of our share to social Premium Plugin: https://www.ultimatelysocial.com/usm-premium/.

I get error messages ‘Error : 7’, ‘Error : 56’, ‘Error : 6’ etc.

Those point to a CURL-issue on your site. Please contact your server admin or your hosting company to resolve it.

The plugin requires CURL for the social share counts and other features.

Social share icons don’t show

Please ensure you actually placed the social share buttons either as social widget (in your widget area) or as floating icons under question 5). The Premium Plugin makes placing the social icons especially easy and also allows you to place sticky social share icons on your site, define the placement of the social share icons by margins and many other options, see https://www.ultimatelysocial.com/usm-premium/.

If only some social share icons show, but not all, then please clear your cache, and check if you may have conflicting browser extensions (e.g. ‘Disconnect’-app in Chrome). Also Ad-Blockers are known culprits, please switch them off temporarily to see if that is the reason.

If the social share icons still don’t show then there’s an issue with your template. Please contact the creator of your template for that.

If you are referring to specific social share icons not showing in the plugin itself (e.g. you’re looking for a Whatsapp share icon, but it doesnt exist) please note that our Premium Plugin has many more social media share icons, see https://www.ultimatelysocial.com/usm-premium/

Twitter social share counts are not displaying (anymore)

Unfortunately, Twitter stopped providing any social share count. God knows why.

Changes don’t get saved / Deleted plugin but the social share icons still show

Most likely you have the WP Cache plugin installed. Please de-activate and then re-activate it, then the social share icons should display again.

Links when clicking on the social share icons don’t work

Please ensure you’ve entered the ‘https://’ at the beginning of the url (for all social networks). If the social share icons are not clickable at all there is most likely an issue with your template. This is especially the case if you’ve given your social share buttons several features, which should show a pop-up (tooltip) when you move over the social share icons.

I cannot upload custom social share icons

Most likely that’s because you’ve set ‘allow_url_fopen’ to ‘off’. Please turn it to ‘on’ (or ask your server admin to do so, he’ll know what to do. Tell them you need it to upload custom share icons for a social media buttons plugin).

My Youtube social share icon (direct follow) doesn’t work

Please ensure that you’ve selected the radio button ‘Username’ when you enter a youtube username, or ‘Channel ID’ when you entered a channel ID.

Aligning the social share icons (centered, left- or right-aligned) doesn’t work

The alignment options under question 5 align the social share icons with respect to each other, not where they appear on the page. Our new Premium Plugin is the best social sharing plugin on the market, allowing you to define also many other social share icon alignments (e.g. within a widget, within shortcode etc.).

Clicking on the RSS icon returns funny codes

That’s normal. RSS users will know what to do with it (i.e. copy & paste the url into their RSS readers).

Facebook ‘like’-count isn’t correct

When you ‘like’ something on your blog via facebook it likes the site you’re currently on (e.g. your blog) and not your Facebook page.

The new Premium Plugin also allows to show the number of your Facebook page likes, see https://www.ultimatelysocial.com/usm-premium/.

Sharing doesn’t take the right text or picture

We use the share codes from Facebook etc. and therefore don’t have any influence over which text & pic Facebook decides to share.

Note that you can define an image as ‘Featured Image’ which tells Facebook etc. to share that one. You’ll find this ‘Featured Image’ section in your blog’s admin area where you can edit your blog post.

You can crosscheck which image Facebook will take by entering your url on https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/og/object/.

UPDATE: we made significant enhancements to the premium plugin, it now allows you to define the sharing pics and texts for your social share icons.

The pop-up shows although I only gave my social share icon one function

The pop-up only disappears if you’ve given your social share icons only a ‘visit us’-function, otherwise (e.g. if you gave it ‘Like’ (on facebook) or ‘Tweet’ functions) a pop-up is still needed because the social share buttons for those are coming directly from the social media sites (e.g. Facebook, Twitter) and we don’t have any influence over their design.

I selected to display the social share icons after every post but they don’t show

The social share icons usually do show, however not on your blog page, but on your single posts pages. The Premium plugin (https://www.ultimatelysocial.com/usm-premium/) also allows to display the social share icons on your homepage.

Plugin decreases my site’s loading speed

The plugin is one of the most optimized social media plugin in terms of impact on a site’s loading speed (optimized code, compressed pictures etc.).

If you still experience loading speed issues, please note that:

• The more sharing- and invite- features you place on your site, the more external codes you load (i.e. from the social media sites; we just use their share code), therefore impacting loading speed. So to prevent this, give your social share icons only ‘Visit us’-functionality rather than sharing-functionalities.

• We’ve programmed it so that the code for the social media icons is the one which loads lasts on your site, i.e. after all the other content has already been loaded. This means: even if there is a decrease in loading speed, it does not impact a user’s experience because he sees your site as quickly as before, only the social media icons take a bit longer to load.

There might be also other issues on your site which cause a high loading speed (e.g. conflicts with our plugins or template issues). Please ask your template creator about that.

Also, if you’ve uploaded social media sharing icons not provided by the plugin itself (i.e. custom share icons) please ensure they are compressed as well.

After moving from demo-server to live-server the follow/subscribe-link doesn’t work anymore

Please delete and install the plugin again.

If you already placed the code for a subscription form on your site, remove it again and take the new one from the new plugin installation.

There are other issues when I activate the plugin or place the social share icons

Please check the following:

The plugin requires that CURL is installed & activated on your server (which should be the standard case). If you don’t have it, please contact your hosting provider.

Please ensure that you don’t have any browser extension activated which may conflict with the plugin, esp. those which block certain content. Known culprits include the ‘Disconnect’ extension in Chrome or the ‘Privacy Badger’ extension in Firefox.

If issues persist most likely your theme has issues which makes it incompatible with our plugin. Please contact your template creator for that. As part of the Premium Plugin (https://www.ultimatelysocial.com/usm-premium/) we fix also theme issues, and provide support to ensure that your social media share buttons appear on your site (exactly where you want them).

How can I see how many people decided to share or like my post?

You can see this by activating the social share ‘counts’ on the front end (under question 4 in the USM plugin, question 5 in the USM+ plugin).

We cannot provide you this data in other ways as it’s coming directly from the social media sites. One exception: if you like to know when people start to follow you by email, then you can get email alerts. For that, please claim your feed (see question above).

How can I change the ‘Please follow & like us :)’?

You can change it in the Widget-area where you dropped the widget (with the social share icons) on the sidebar. Please click on it (on the sidebar), it will open the menu where you can change the text.

If you don’t want to show any text, just enter a space (‘ ‘).

Can I use a shortcode to place the social share icons?

Yes, use [DISPLAY_ULTIMATE_SOCIAL_ICONS] to show the social share icons. You can place it into any editor.

Alternatively, you can place the following into your codes to show the share icons:

In some cases there might be issues to display social media sharing buttons which you uploaded as custom share icons. In this case, we provide support as part of our premium plugin: https://www.ultimatelysocial.com/usm-premium/

Can I get more options for the social share icons next to posts?

Please use this plugin for that: https://www.ultimatelysocial.com/usm-premium/

Can I also give the email-icon a ‘mailto:’ functionality?

Yes, that is possible in our new social share plugin, the Premium Plugin: https://www.ultimatelysocial.com/usm-premium/

Can I also display the social share icons vertically?

Yes, that is possible in our new social sharing plugin, the Premium Plugin: https://www.ultimatelysocial.com/usm-premium/.

How can I change the text on the ‘visit us’-buttons?

Use this plugin: https://www.ultimatelysocial.com/usm-premium/

Can I deactivate the social share icons on mobile?

Yes, you can disable the share icons under question 5. In our new Premium Plugin you can define different settings for mobile, see https://www.ultimatelysocial.com/usm-premium/. The best way to share social media! ??

How can I use two instances of the plugin on my site?

You cannot use the same plugin twice, however you can install both the USM as well as the Premiuem plugin (https://www.ultimatelysocial.com/usm-premium/). We’ve developed the code so that there are no conflicts and you can place the share icons in one way with one plugin, and select other share icons with the other plugin and place them differently.

Is the plugin also available in my language?

It depends on which language you speak ?? however probably the answer is “yes”, as we recently translated it into the most common languages:

• French: Boutons de partage de médias sociaux et ic?nes de partage social
• Spanish: Botones para compartir en redes sociales e íconos para compartir en redes sociales
• Portuguese: Bot?es de compartilhamento de mídia social e ícones de compartilhamento social
• Greek: Κουμπι? κοιν?? χρ?ση? μ?σων κοινωνικ?? δικτ?ωση? και εικον?δια κοιν?? χρ?ση? μ?σων κοινωνικ?? δικτ?ωση?
• Dutch: Knoppen voor het delen van sociale media en pictogrammen voor sociaal delen
• German: Schaltfl?chen zum Teilen in soziale Medien und Symbole zum Teilen in soziale Netzwerke
• Italian: Pulsanti di condivisione dei social media e icone di condivisione sui social
• Finnish: Sosiaalisen median jakopainikkeet ja sosiaalisen jakamisen kuvakkeet
• Russian: Кнопки ?Поделиться в социальных сетях? и значки ?Поделиться в социальных сетях?
• Turkish: Sosyal Medya Payla??m Dü?meleri ve Sosyal Payla??m Simgeleri
• Ukrainian: Кнопки обм?ну в соц?альних мережах ? п?ктограми обм?ну в соц?альних мережах
• Croatian: Gumbi za dijeljenje na dru?tvenim mre?ama i ikone za dijeljenje na dru?tvenim mre?ama
• Hungarian: K?z?sségi média megosztási gombok és k?z?sségi megosztási ikonok
• Arabic: ????? ?????? ??????? ?????????? ???????? ???????? ??????????
• Indonesian: Tombol Berbagi Media Sosial & Ikon Berbagi Sosial
• Chinese: 社交媒体分享按钮和社交分享图标
• English: Social Media Share Buttons & Social Sharing Icons
• Vietnamese: Các nút chia s? trên m?ng x? h?i & bi?u t??ng chia s? trên m?ng x? h?i
• Polish: Przyciski udost?pniania w mediach spo?eczno?ciowych i ikony udost?pniania w mediach spo?eczno?ciowych
• Persian: ???? ??? ?????? ????? ????? ??? ??????? ? ??????? ?????? ????? ???????

Reviews

Testing. So far, so good.

paragon2001 November 20, 2024 1 reply

Seems to work as described. Giving a 5 star benefit of the doubt.

Awesome!

davidesouza November 17, 2024 1 reply

Great Plugin!

Unable to deactivate

Richard Brown November 15, 2024 1 reply

Horrible plugins that takes the option to deactivate without a reason. I don’t like these plugins.

About to test it

Rivages Informatique November 5, 2024

Don’t know at the moment, force to review before using it because I want to deactivate email.

Muito bom

iskonn October 24, 2024 1 reply

Very useful

Sharing my new product from QUICK-FIRE Striker Products.

September 29, 2024 1 reply

Sharing my new product from QUICK-FIRE Striker Products was very easy to do! This plugin will help the efforts I am making with my paid ads.

Contributors & Developers

Changelog

2.9.4

• Refactored Youtube subscribe button to use channel id

2.9.3

• Tested with WordPress 6.6.2
• Aligned new icons for desktop (Copy URL, InHa, RIA)
• Fixed option to hide/show display count for X/Twitter platform
• Improved CSS generation for icons (widget)
• Fixed issue when not all settings were saved in Section 3
• Added new icons for Copy Site URL button
• Added more detailed errors during settings conflicts
• Updated facebook SDK to v3.2
• Improved placement of Whatsapp and Pinterest icons

2.9.2

• Resolved CVE-2024-37552
• Tested with WordPress 6.6
• Minor performance improvements
• Improvements for PHP 8 utilization
• Fixed copy url icon in Edge cases

2.9.1

• Added new icons
• Improved email filter
• Tested with WordPress 6.5.3
• Better calibration of icons
• Fixed bugs with icon sizes
• Fixed translation lines

2.9.0

• [FIX] Select default color RateItAll social network icon
• [FIX] Select default color IncreasingHappiness social network icon

2.8.9

• [NEW] Adding new RateItAll social network icon
• [NEW] Adding new IncreasingHappiness social network icon
• [NOTE] Tested with WordPress v6.5
• [NOTE] Patched reported issues (@Dmitrii Ignatyev) + 7823147

2.8.8

• [FIX] Fixed CRS Errors
• [FIX] Fixed permissions for settings access, now users with “manage_options” can access the plugin
• [FIX] Fixed issue with sfsi_plus_hide_admin_forum_notification action.
• [FIX] Issues with X/Twitter URL share encoding and URL sanitization.
• [NOTE] Updated plugin’s author name in readme
• [NOTE] Tested with WordPress v6.4.3

2.8.7

• [NEW] Improved look of Dark X icons and buttons
• [NEW] Refactored code of facebook share/likes API
• [NEW] Added alternate text to icons in reader mode
• [FIX] Adjusted text of “Tweet” -> “Post on X” where needed
• [FIX] Adjusted X icon position on desktop screens
• [FIX] Resolved minor issues with floating icons
• [FIX] Resolved issues with facebook share cache count
• [FIX] Resolved issues with hover text of copy icon
• [FIX] Added proper setting validation to prevent issues with PHP 8+
• [NOTE] Upgraded “TryItOut” module to latest version
• [NOTE] Upgraded analyst module to latest version
• [NOTE] Tested with WordPress v6.4.2
• [NOTE] Tested up to PHP v8.3

2.8.6

• Tested with WordPress 6.4-beta & PHP 8.2
• Now icons are disabled in page builders
• Improved copy icon functionality to support more systems
• Replaced twitter icon with X
• Changed default colors for X
• Updated carrousel module for PHP 8.2 and resolved conflicts
• Improved overall compatiblity with PHP 8.2

2.8.5

• Forced “Try it out” module to be disabled by default, user can still enable it manually.

2.8.4

• Fixed important issues reported by Rafie M

2.8.3

• Removed unused modules
• Updated all shared modules to their latest versions
• Tested with WP 6.3 RC
• Improved PHP 8+ compatibility

2.8.2

• Tested with WP 6.2.2
• Adjusted text inputs
• Removed unused modules
• Updated carrousel module

2.8.1

• Tested with WP 6.2
• Added mastodon icons and support
• Fixed display bugs
• Adjusted plugin compatibility with third-party plugins
• Fixed share counts
• Fixed social pop-up icons not displaying
• Adjustment of flat icons
• Allow to show other icons on popup banner
• Fixed offset PHP errors

2.8.0

• Adjusted PHP compatibility

2.7.9

• Added black-friday theme (only for that period)
• Tested up to WordPress 6.1.1

2.7.8

• Fixed issues with after post icons
• Plugin tested with WordPress 6.1 @ PHP 8.1