How to Increase Social Shares With the Social Warfare Plugin

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Would you like to get more social shares on your blog?

While there’s no shortage of social media sharing plugins to add sharing buttons to your blog or website, how do you know which one you should use?

Most of them are very basic, can cause your site to run slow, and offer limited functionality.

In this article, I’m going to review the Social Warfare Plugin.

You’ll learn why it’s different from other social plugins and how it can actually help you increase shares almost immediately on your site and so much more!

What is the Social Warfare Plugin?

The Social Warfare Plugin is a beautiful and feature-rich WordPress plugin that adds responsive share buttons and total share counts to your site in seconds all without needing to edit any code.

It was created by Dustin Stout, Jason Wiser, and Nicholas Cardot, three guy’s with a strong background in visual design which is reflected in the Social Warfare plugin’s design.

Example of the Social Warfare plugin once it is installed

In addition to being able to quickly add sharing buttons to your site, the Social Warfare plugin is unique because they’ve also included other powerful features such as click-to-tweet and the ability to upload an image for use on Pinterest.

Typically, you have to pay for these two features separately. Social Warfare has included both of them in their plugin.

Example of click-to-tweet

Example of Pinterest image optimization

Let’s take a look at the Social Warfare plugin and see just how well it works.

A Review of the Social Warfare Plugin

Social Warfare Features

On the surface, the Social Warfare plugin doesn’t look like much.

That’s because you have to go into your WordPress dashboard to setup and configure the plugin.

Within your dashboard, you have a host of options you can customize.

Let’s take a look at each of the features in the Social Warfare plugin.

Social sharing icons

Social Warfare is primarily a plugin to add share buttons to your blog or website. They make it really easy to add and customize the share buttons to fit the overall look-and-feel of your site.

Visual options in Social Warfare — Choose a color set and decide where Social Warfare will show up on your site

If you only want to display some of the social media icons, they’re also easy to disable.

Social media share icons — Disable social media icons you don’t need with just a click

You can also reorder them based on which social networks are most popular with your readers.

Re-order share buttons — Use the drag-and-drop interface to reorder your social media icons in the Social Warfare plugin

If you want to customize the buttons so that they match the colors on your website, you can also specify a hex code.

Overall, I found it very easy to setup social sharing using Social Warfare.

The only feature I would love to see is the ability to change the shape of the buttons like in Flare Pro.

Click to tweet

One of my favorite features of the Social Warfare plugin is the ability to include customizable tweets in your blog content.

This allows you to quickly add a call-to-action within your articles to better engage with your readers.

The Social Warfare Plugin provides you with four types of click to tweet styles to choose from.

You can also create your own by adding CSS to your theme.

Once you’ve selected the style you want to use, it’s time to build your tweet.

You can add a tweet (or multiple tweets) to your blog post from your Wordpress dashboard.

Click-to-tweet in a post — Add a tweet to your blog post to help it stand out to readers

Insert the quote you want displayed in your article. You can then create a separate custom tweet with all of the mentions and hashtags you want to include.

This is a nice feature because sometimes having Twitter mentions and hashtags in the middle of your post can interrupt the flow of the content for readers.

Create a tweet for your content — Build your own click to tweet using Social Warfare

Having used other click-to-tweet options such as click-to-tweet from CoSchedule, I found the Social Warfare version easier to setup and use.

They have also removed their branding from the click-to-tweet feature where CoSchedule hasn’t.

Optimize your post for Pinterest

The last feature included in the Social Warfare plugin is the ability to set specific images to use for Facebook, LinkedIn, Google Plus and Pinterest.

I currently use the WordPress SEO by Yoast plugin to specify which images I want used when my content is shared across social media channels.

One thing that has been missing is the ability to set an image to use for Pinterest.

I used to have to include an image within my post (even if it didn’t flow with the content).

The Social Warfare plugin now provides this feature along with the recommended sizes you should use for each social network (a bonus).

Because they make it so easy to specify which image you want to use when your content is shared, there is no excuse for your content not to include one.

Overall, I really don’t have any complaints about this feature. It just works.

Benefits of Social Warfare

In addition to the features included with the Social Warfare plugin, it does a lot of other things too.

Social Warfare caches share counts. This means it loads faster than any other social sharing plugin
Sorts your blog posts by popularity (social shares)
Mobile responsive design
Exceptional customer support

One other benefit that a lot of business owners will appreciate is that by using the Social Warfare plugin, you can remove other plugins that provide duplicate functionality on your site.

For example, I can eliminate other click-to-tweet plugins that I no longer need because the Social Warfare plugin includes those features.