WordPress truly is an incredible website builder. Its unrivalled features and capabilities have lead to a digital dominance, with around 35% of sites employing the software. Apart from the standard package, you can extend your blog or website with some of the 54,000+ plugins available. In fact, choosing the best ones for you may be a bit overwhelming, especially if you’re a beginner. That’s why I’m here to help you with a selection of the best social engagement WordPress plugins for your website.
Time spent and user engagement are crucial for any type of site. You’ll most likely assess your success by these metrics, especially if your main produce is content. Publishing quality texts is a must, but you also have to strive to facilitate a reaction from the readers. You have to do everything in your power to not let those precious visits and clicks go to waste!
One way to facilitate social engagement and make people interact with your content is by installing relevant extensions. However, WP plugin directory is a digital jungle, and it’s not easy to make your way through it due to the sheer volume of available options.
At the end of the day, it’s not about adding as many plugins as possible, but rather figuring out which ones will meet your needs best. I went on and listed a number of WP extensions that should help any content-based site grow. Dig in!
Content
Since content is the backbone of your operations, it’s imperative that people spend as much time as possible interacting with it. The quality of your writing will always be the number one attractor, however, you may enhance the user experience by installing some content-boosting plugins.
If you want to keep the eyeballs on for longer and generate more clicks, consider the following WordPress extensions.
Related Posts by Bibblio
Showing relevant related post is the first step to making the readers stay. Bibblio is no ordinary plugin and employs artificial intelligence to deliver suggestions.
The AI stays learning from your content, so the more you publish, the better the related pieces will be. The plugin doesn’t slow down your site and offers a variety of filtering and display options.
Yasr
Which stands for Yet Another Stars Rating provides a powerful way to add SEO-ready user generated reviews and testimonials to your posts, pages, and CPTs.
It’s easy to add while you’re creating a post or you can enable a setting which will add it automatically.
Content Locker
Now this is an interesting WordPress social engagement plugin if you’re looking to boost your content distribution efforts.
In essence, you can put your most valuable content behind a sort of a paywall, where the currency is the user’s like or share. One of its most useful features is the option to lock any part of the post, so one will have to share in order to finish reading the text.
Social media
Selecting the best social media sharing plugin for WordPress may be a real pain because of the sheer amount of the available options. How do you figure out which of these add-ons will be the most suiting for your blog?
AddtoAny Share Buttons
In my opinion, when it comes to social sharing plugins, it comes down to two things. Personal preference as far as the button design goes, and whether you can place icons to your social media profiles in the widget area.
AddtoAny offers clean sharing buttons that will fit with any site design and has a widget for your social pages you can add directly in the visual editor. That’s all you can ask for, really.
Smash Balloon Social Photo Feed
Instagram has been a very popular social media platform and a place for people to express themselves in visual terms. Adding a photo feed can be a great way to beautify your site. Images attract eyeballs and speak a thousand words – it’s been proven time and time again and you know it.
This plugin is fully customizable and even allows you to display photos from multiple accounts in a single feed. Give it a try if you feel like you have something special to show to the world.
Better Click to Tweet
This is another WordPress social engagement plugin that can help you get more exposure in social media. In essence it allows readers to turn excerpts of your content into tweets directly on the page.
Do you feel like you have some nice quotables and hot takes? Install this plugin and let people share them for you.
Online community
WordPress is an amazingly versatile CMS that allows you to publish, present, interact, and build community around your content. Growing an online community is crucial for your long-term success, as these are the people who are your most dedicated fans, and perhaps even customers.
bbPress
If creating an actual community of returning visitors is at the top of your agenda, you should consider adding a discussion board to your site.
This plugin is a forum software built by WordPress contributors which provides a platform for an ongoing and structured discussion.
BuddyPress
Using this plugin you can go even a step further and turn your site into an actual social network with a suite of components.
Site visitors will be able to register, create profiles, message each other, create groups, and more. This is an all-in-one package for creating a truly engaging social experience with WordPress.
Chatwee
Online communities vary and so do the communication styles of their members. Some may prefer a slower-paced, long-form discussion board, while others favor rapid exchange of short messages in real time.
Chatwee is a group chat and instant messaging platform that lets users talk in public chat rooms, private conversations, or groups. It allows for extensive customization, posting of rich media, and has different display modes, among other things.
Conclusion
All in all, the goal of a website admin should be to get visitors to spend more time on their pages and be more involved with the content and each other.
Optimizing user experience is easier with social engagement plugins, of which there’s a wide selection in the WordPress plugin directory.
Give some of the extensions listed here a try and feel free to share how it worked for you in the comments.
