Social media has taken the online space by storm and, these days, we can hardly imagine a website existing without at least some level of social media integration. The benefits of such integration are clearly visible. With a good social media plugin for WordPress, you will be able to share your posts with friends and family on all of the most popular social platforms out there. More than that, your readers will be able to do it too, effectively growing your audience and making your site more popular. Ultimately, publishing content that goes viral on social media can skyrocket your traffic and make your site visible to thousands of new people every week, or even every day.
So, the way we're going to make it easier for your readers (and you) to share your content is by displaying some social media buttons on your site, and more accurately, on each post and page that your site consists of.
The social media plugin called Simple Social Media Share Buttons is a great free solution that gives you the requisite functionality. It is available at https://wordpress.org/plugins/simple-social-buttons/:
After installing and activating it, you can go to the plugin's settings section in Social Buttons | Settings. There, you can review the default settings that the plugin comes with out of the box. The good news is that if you don't want to deal with any of those, you can just leave things as they are—all of the settings are optional. If you do want to play around, however, you can change a load of things about how social media buttons are presented on your site:
As you can see, the interface is really easy to grasp, lets you pick from a range of different social networks, and also gives you some basic customization options (such as changing the size of the buttons, their position on the page, and whether or not you want the share counter to be displayed). When you're done experimenting with the settings, click on Save Changes.
For example, the settings I have selected in my setup include only Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn buttons, plus a slick minimal theme to make those buttons stand out. Here's what they look like under a blog post:
