Getting social shares on your content and promoting your content via social media are crucial parts of maintaining an online business.

If you put out high quality content, you should do your content justice by enabling social sharing buttons.

Traffic from social media is highly valuable. And since there are a variety of social media sites (like Twitter, Facebook, Google+ etc.) chances are that your audience are hanging out on any of them.

Social media has become an inevitable part of online world to many people. And unlike other modes of promotion, social media promotion helps you promote your content in a  rather cool way, because people are in a cool mood on social media, right?

So how do you encourage people to share your content on social media? By integrating those share buttons right into your content.

Fortunately, if you are using WordPress you have lots of plugins for the purpose. I am not a fan of suggesting you to load your WordPress website with plugins – just because you have plugins doesn’t mean you should install them all.

So I’ve picked just 8 plugins so I don’t confuse you with a lot of options. Go through the features of the plugins and select the one which best suits you!

Social warfare

When it comes to social sharing Social Warfare is my first choice. I simply LOVE the plugin for the features it has.

It is a premium plugin indeed. But it is totally worth it.

The thing I mostly like about this plugin is the sleek design of the share buttons. You can choose the display options however you like.

And you also have the control with displaying the share counts – you can have the plugin stop displaying the count until a certain threshold is reached. You have total control of which share buttons to display, in what order should be displayed and so on.

You can choose how to display the buttons and whether they should float or not as well!

As far as link shortening is concerned, you can connect your bit.ly account and have the urls shortened automatically.

The plugin also allows you to upload Pinterest or Facebook specific images, so you don’t have issues with misaligned or random images appearing on your social updates.

Sumome

SumoMe is not just a single plugin for social share. It is a bundle of plugins – each one accomplishes a different purpose.

The particular plugin we talk about here is the SumoMe’s share plugin. A unique feature of SumoMe is that you can order the social sharing buttons based on the number of shares each network gets.

It also provides neat analytics so you can see on which social media platforms your blog posts perform well.

Just like Social Warfare, you can choose to display the social counts for all buttons or for some, or you can set a threshold above which you can set the counts to be displayed.

Monarch by Elegant Themes

Monarch by Elegant themes is another premium social sharing plugin. The share buttons as sexy and helps encouraging visitors to share your blog posts.

Apart from placing the buttons wherever you want, you can actually have fly in style social sharing buttons which is very cool.

You can also track social shares and likes/follows with the in-built analytics feature.

The only thing that could put off some people is that the plugin is not separately for sale. To get this plugin, you have to join Elegant themes which is a recurring membership ($89/year) that includes access to all their plugins.

Of course you can cancel any time.

Shareaholic

Shareaholic is a free, popular social sharing plugin that has been around for a very long time.

This plugin does a lot more than social sharing. It also helps with monetizing your site and offering promoted content.

You have to sign up for an account with them to be able to fully use all the features. But it is free!

WP Social sharing

WP Social Sharing plugin allows you to add the buttons of 6 major social networks, and this of course includes Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Pinterest, and LinkedIn.

So if you are just fine with these networks, nothing stops you from choosing this plugin.

Apart from choosing to automatically display the buttons on posts, pages etc. you can also place the share buttons via shortcode.

AddThis

AddThis is yet another free social sharing plugin that supports numerous social media platforms. It supports over 200 social media platforms as well as bookmarking sites.

The sharing buttons are simple, clean and easily customisable. If you are looking for a simple social sharing option for your blog, this plugin is a cool option.

ShareThis

ShareThis works pretty much like AddThis. The plugin supports 120 social channels. You can choose to have small or large buttons.

The plugin helps you to track your shares by creating a Social Analytics Dashboard account.

Genesis Simple Share

As the name suggests, this plugin is highly suitable for your blog if you have Genesis framework on your site.

I highly recommend Genesis framework by the way. Once you have this plugin installed, the share buttons are enabled on post pages by default.

Changing the order of share buttons is just a drag drop away! If you want a particular image to show up when readers share the post on social media, you can provide the url of that image in a dedicated space.

Which of these social sharing plugins is your favourite?

So yes, I’ve given you just 8 plugins to choose from. Depending on your personal preference and depending on your blog’s purpose choose the plugin which suits you best.

Let us know in the comments which of these plugins you choose and why! If you do have a new plugin to add to this list, please feel free to do so.