WordPress Tip: How To Display Total Social Shares

Most bloggers I know have added Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and other social media buttons to their websites. Not all your posts are going to perform the same way on those sites. By tracking the total # of shares per post, you can figure out which topics interest your visitors the most. Displaying that information might also encourage a greater number of your visitors to pay attention to your best posts. Here are 3 plugins and scripts you can use to add the total # of social shares to your posts:

Sharrre: it is a very dynamic script for showing social sharing buttons on websites. You can do all kinds of neat things with this as long as you know a bit of JavaScript and CSS. Studying the demos included on the site is the best way to get started.

Top Social Share Posts: displays top shared posts on your website. It cover Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, StumbleUpon, Reddit, and Pinterest. You can filter out older posts to offer your visitors only new posts.

Flare: Flare is an eye-catching social sharing bar that shows the total # of times an article has been shared and much more. The plugin is not in active development anymore but you can get the hosted version.

You don’t always need a fancy plugin to display social media stats on your website. The above scripts look attractive and do make your job easier. We have had the most success with the first one.