Finally.
After years of being unhappy with our social sharing plugins, I’ve found a WordPress social sharing plugin for ChurchMag that makes me happy.
For a while we used the default Jetpack offering – yuck – and then I began to use an alternative solution. But shortly after, Twitter pulled their support for showing Twitter counts.
But wait, let me back up for a second, I’m getting ahead of myself here.
Not Just About Social Sharing
I understand the purpose of a social share button is about increasing social shares. It’s a reminder to the reader to share it, it makes it easy for the user to share the post, and it also adds some authority to the post when a reader sees that the content has been shared before.
While all this is true for ChurchMag I also use it as one of several metrics to determine the overall impact of content. So, you can imagine how frustrated I was to lose our Twitter numbers. Moreover, I have found that some social sharers have a hard time registering count numbers.
The last – year? – has been a real downer for me in the social sharer department, so as I outlined ChurchMag 3.0, this was one of my top considerations.
Social Warfare: An Awesome Social Sharing Plugin
When it comes to design, you can’t do any better than Social Warfare. But beauty is more than just pixel deep with this beauty.
Not only does the design fit us well, but Social Warfare has integrated the NewShareCounts.com service which displays your – wait for it, wait for it – Twitter share counts! 😀
I can’t tell you how nice it is to look at a post and see how many social shares our content has across all our favorite networks. It’s. Amazing.
Funny thing is, this isn’t really where Social Warfare shines the most. There are several other features we haven’t even touched yet:
- Pinterest images
- Custom tweets
- Shareable quotes
- Popular posts widget
- And more!
We are using the content protection feature, share count recover when switching from HTTP to HTTPS, Google Analytics integration, Twitter Cards, and I’ve been really happy with how fast it loads.
Did I mention it’s developer friendly? I was able to change-up some CSS really easily and we are calling it with a Genesis hook so we can display it exactly where we want it.
Conclusion
Social Warfare is by far the best WordPress social sharing plugin.
It’s easy to setup and has a useful feature set, pleasing everyone from the beginner to the developer.
Dustin W. Stout says
Thanks so much for featuring Social Warfare Eric! Love seeing it here and can’t wait to see how your numbers are affected by it! Cheers!
Eric Dye says
We’re curious to see, too! 😀