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A Powerful Social Media Toolkit For WordPress

There’s no denying it. When social media works, it can transform your business.

All it takes is one post to hit that sweet spot. And before you know it, your traffic explodes overnight.

Going viral online might be everyone’s dream. But the real power of social media, is in the relationships you form over time.

It’s through careful nurturing and engaging the people interested in what you do, that your real audience emerges.

So how do you develop your social presence in a natural and authentic way?

The internet is littered with examples telling you what to do. But I’m a firm believer in finding your own way, and I do this with the help of a few tools.

So how about we look at a WordPress Plugin that makes leveraging the power of social media easier?

I’m talking about Social Snap. Could this be the ultimate WordPress social media plugin? Let’s find out in my Social Snap review.

What is Social Snap?

Social Snap is a WordPress social media plugin that helps you leverage the power of social media by allowing you to control how visitors share and view your content.

It’s super fast, loading in the blink of an eye and it’s easy to use. You’ll be up and running in a matter of minutes.

With over 30 social networks and apps to choose from, and the ability to place share buttons almost anywhere on your site, it’s a comprehensive plugin that does exactly what you need it to.

Social Snap has both a free and premium version of their plugin. But this review will focus on the premium version as the free option is heavily limited and I want to show you the full breadth of options available.

Visit Social Snap

Using Social Snap

Getting started with Social Snap is probably easier than many other alternative social media plugins.

Simply download the plugin, install it to your WordPress site and hit activate.

Now you’re ready to enjoy the full package of what this plugin can offer. So how about we take a look at the core features and explore how to set them up.

Managing social networks

The first option you’ll see when heading to the Social Snap dashboard is a list of settings. The most important of these is the social sharing option. Click Social Sharing and a new set of options are revealed.

This area is all about which social networks you use and where you want them to display on your website.

Click Manage Networks to reveal your options.

Your options here include adding your preferred social networks, refreshing your share counts and choosing the share count providers for Facebook and Twitter.

The additional share count provider options are available should you wish to use a third party to track shares for Twitter, or Official Facebook counts for Facebook.

To add your social networks, click Add Networks.

As you can see there is a vast range of options open to you, based on the networks you use the most and where your audience gathers online.

Choose your networks and click Save Changes.

Share button placement

Now it’s time to choose where to display your social buttons on your website. With Social Snap button locations include:

  • A floating sidebar
  • Inline buttons
  • Buttons on your media
  • A share hub
  • And sticky bar

Let’s take a look at each option in more detail.

Floating sidebar

When clicking Floating Sidebar, you are given a preview of how it will look on your live website.

You can choose to change the position of the sidebar and offset its appearance by entering the number of pixels.

The button shape can also be changed to rounded, a circle or a rectangle along with the ability to increase or decrease the size.

You can decide which pages to display your sidebar, by selecting only the ones you want. For example, I only want to show the floating sidebar on the home and post pages so I’ve only checked those boxes.

Further options include:

  • Button spacing
  • All networks which allows visitors to choose from all available networks
  • Network label tooltips
  • Total share count
  • Individual share counts
  • Hide on mobile
  • View count
  • Min share count

What’s more, you can choose animations for the entrance of your floating sidebar and button hovers. Want to choose your own custom colours? You can do that too.

Inline buttons

Inline buttons include all of the same options as with the floating sidebar. However, these buttons are positioned above, below or above and below your content.

This is a great way to get people to share a blog post or article. You can even customise the ‘Share via’ text by changing it to a more personal message for your readers.

On media

On Media buttons are an excellent way to get your visitors to share your images and videos.

People with a large Pinterest presence will love this as you can use your own custom share images on a per post basis. You can also change the visibility of the buttons to only show on hover if you prefer.

Share hub

The Social Snap share hub is an expandable button that sits discreetly at the bottom of your screen. The share buttons are only revealed once a visitor clicks the share hub button.

As with the previous placement layouts, all of the options on positioning are available to you. You can even change the colour of your hub button to fit in with the branding of your website.

Sticky Bar

The sticky bar feature displays a full-width strip of social buttons at either the bottom or the top of your website.

If you don’t like the stretched layout, you can always change the buttons to look like those on your inline content.

Social follower settings

Now that you’ve fine-tuned how things will look, it’s time to set up what your follower buttons will look like in your social follow widgets.

Click Social Followers and then select Social Networks.

This where you can set up and reorder the social networks that you want to use in shortcodes and widgets. Drag and drop the networks to change their order based on your own preference.

Heading back to the Social Followers section, click on Default Settings and you’re faced with a screen where you can tweak various settings for the Social Follow element.

You can enable all manner of things here from button size and spacing, to displaying follower counts and network labels.

Don’t like a horizontal layout? Enable the vertical layout feature and if columns are your thing, you can have up to five columns for your follow buttons.

Click to Tweet features

I’ve always loved a good click to tweet option and Social Snap does click-to-tweet expertly.

When setting up this option, you can choose to include your username, a page link and accounts related to the tweet. What’s more, you can enter a description of how each user is related to you.

Naturally, this option can be hidden on mobile to make things more streamlined. But for computer users, there are up to 6 ways to display your click-to-tweet sections.

Style 5 has to be my favourite template of these six.

Social meta

If enabled, the Social Meta section adds Twitter Cards and Open Graph meta tags for more effective and efficient social sharing, search results and better SEO.

You can upload an image that represents your website when shared on social media as your Default Share Image. Twitter card layouts can be changed and you have the ability to include your Twitter username and Facebook profile URL.

Social identity

Social Identity is a straightforward section where you add your Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest information.

Beyond these features, there is a further Advanced Settings section where you can handle

  • Analytics Tracking
  • Share count recovery
  • Link shortening
  • Plugin Migration
  • Plugin Data
  • GDPR Compliance

Furthermore, there is the ability to import and export settings. This is a particularly useful feature for people with multiple websites.

Utilising statistics

The last feature included in the Social Snap plugin I want to discuss is Statistics.

Here you get a really good overview of your social metrics so you can track top performing content and make improvements where needed.

Having a visual representation of your statistics is an excellent inclusion for those of us who prefer visual guides instead of being faced with a heap of numbers. It provides a snap-shot view you can decipher immediately.

Next up in my Social Snap review, we’ll explore the available add-ons…

Social Snap add-ons

Expanding on the wealth of functionality in its main plugin, Social Snap also regularly work on add-ons to bring a better experience to users.

Social Login enables visitors to log into your website using their favourite social networks. You have to configure apps for each of your enabled networks.

Boost Old Posts lets you revive your old posts by automatically sharing them on Twitter and LinkedIn.

Social Auto-Poster automatically shares your new posts to Twitter and LinkedIn.

What’s more, there are two new add-ons in the pipeline which are Social Content Locker and Facebook Messenger Chat. The star of these two is Social Content Locker which asks your visitors to share your post to access the content behind the button. What a great way to get people sharing your content!

Get Social Snap

Pricing of Social Snap

Social Snap is priced in 3 tiers of membership, all with a 30-day money-back guarantee.

The prices are:

  • Plus – $39 for one site for one year of support, including all features but no add-ons
  • Pro – $99 for 3 sites with one year of support, including all features plus add-ons
  • Agency – $299 for 15 sits with one year of support, including all features plus add-ons

It should also be noted here that if you normally use Social Warfare, then switching to Social Snap will provide the ability to import all your images, including your custom Pinterest images. That way you’re not losing any of your custom settings.

Social Snap Review: Final thoughts

It’s difficult growing social profiles with an engaged audience in a world where everyone seems to be shouting from the roof-tops. There’s so much noise and so little time to get things done.

I’ve found that through using Social Snap, you can cut back on some of the heavy lifting by automating a lot of the process.

The great use of share-button placement allows visitors to share the content they resonate with easily. Having buttons on media, for example, is a win for Pinterest users to quickly save images to their favourite boards.

Click-to-tweet functionality actively has your visitors engaging with your content and being able to import your settings and custom images from other plugins like Social Warfare further streamlines the experience.

The bottom line is that Social Snap is the perfect social media plugin for getting people to share and engage with your content in a constantly connected world.

Get Social Snap

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