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:
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!
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
After installing the plugin, you'll see this overview. You'll be taken through the easy-to-understand steps to configure your plugin
As a first step you select which share icons you want to display on your website
Then you'll define what the share icons should do (they can perform several actions, e.g. lead users to your facebook page, or allow them to share your content on their facebook page)
You can pick from a wide range of share icon designs
Here you can animate your social share icons (automatic shuffling, mouse-over effects etc.), to make visitors of your site aware that they can share, follow & like your site
You can choose to display counts next to your social share icons (e.g. number of Twitter-followers)
There are many more options to choose from
You can also add social share icons at the end of every post
...or even display a pop-up (designed to your liking) which asks users to like & share your site
Please also check the more comprehensive FAQ on http://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 ‘http://’ 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:
