Are you looking to link Instagram to your website? Perhaps, you would like to display social proof and branded social media feeds on any page? Or are you hoping to make it easy for your audience to share your posts on social media channels?
Those are the most typical questions and requests website managers get when creating a new website. Social media integrations are a vital part of any modern website.
In this blog post, we’ve curated a list of the 10 best social media widgets and tools for WordPress and other websites.
Add social media icons and links to your website
It’s hard to imagine a website without social media icons and links in the footer. Of course, with a designer and website developer in your team, you can create fully custom icons for your website but a couple of social media widgets and tools have additional benefits.
If you are a WordPress user, Acurax has an easy-to-use social media widget to show social media icons. With their tools, you can use various styles and themes depending on your website. Another highly recommended tool for WordPress users to link their social media channels and icons on a website is called Simple Social Icons.
AddThis and AddToAny are popular options for website managers who’d like to display icons and add social media share buttons to every article and page, too. With AddThis, you can add social share buttons at the end of the article, display popups and tickers, show the share counts, and much more.
You can use these tools on any website, and AddToAny has share button plugins for some of the most common website builders. The best part: both AddThis and AddToAny are entirely free social media widgets!
Embed social media feeds on any website
With the built-in tools of X (formerly Twitter) and Facebook, you can embed the latest posts from your account or page on any website. However, the standard Facebook Page plugin and X/Twitter widget provide minimal customization options - and you won’t be able to mix the content from multiple channels in one place. Also, many companies like to embed Instagram feeds and YouTube videos and those channels don’t provide ready-made tools for embedding.
If you are looking to combine multiple channels and hashtag campaigns in one place, you will need a social media aggregator.
With Flockler, you can gather content from Instagram, Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), YouTube, TikTok, and more and embed social media feeds on any website and digital service. Once you’ve stored the content from various channels and hashtag campaigns, you have full control of what is displayed on your website. Also, there’s an option to store all content for review before displaying them.
From Flockler, brands and organisations like GoPro, Harvard University, Continental, and Campari create social walls, grids, carousels, and slideshows and place social media widgets into an unlimited number of pages and digital services.
For more inspiration on how brands use social media aggregators, check how to create an Instagram widget for any website.
Gather feedback and create better quality content
Most marketers use Google Analytics or similar tools to track and measure traffic on their website. From the analytics account, website managers typically view and analyse key performance indicators like time spent on site and bounce rate to see if their audience finds a specific piece of content valuable and helpful.
But does the time spent on site really tell you if the customer found the answer to their question?
Not necessarily, and that’s where React & Share comes in. This clever social media widget is embedded on content pages to gather feedback and reactions from your audience. The buttons are fully customizable, and your content creation team can modify the reaction options depending on the context. Combining and analyzing the traffic data with feedback and reactions makes it easier to prioritize content creation tasks and identify content gaps on your website.
Share blog posts to social media
If content is King, then distribution is Queen, says the content team at Buzzfeed. Without social media shares, there’s always a risk that even the most loyal fans won’t find your latest content.
Also, social media shares is considered to be one of the many signals that Google’s algorithm looks at when determining the value (and rankings) of a particular website.
Therefore, one of the most important social media widgets and tools for your website is a social media management platform, allowing you to distribute the content effortlessly across all social media channels.
If you are using WordPress, Blog2Social can help you automatically broadcast your latest news and blog posts on social media channels.
For more sophistication and control, we recommend Buffer for social media shares and management. With Buffer, you can schedule and publish social media posts on multiple channels. Also, you can let their algorithm automatically rotate your latest posts in mixed intervals based on the past engagement data.
If you have a large social media marketing team and a lot of accounts for your company, enterprise-level social media management tools like SocialPilot, Hootsuite, and SproutSocial are worth checking out.
