There are a great deal of social media plugins you can integrate into your website to easily add social network features. Adding a social media plugin to your favorite web applications can help greatly in simplifying the process of using social media to bring traffic to your website.
In this guide I'll cover social media plugins for the 3 most popular CMS (Content Management Systems) that we see people using. These would be WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal, but almost every platform has some plugins.
This article will be updated as we write about additional social media plugins, so be sure to check back often. Also if you have any suggestions of some great social media plugins we should include please comment below!
Why use a Social Media plugin?
If you happened to have already read my guide on adding social media buttons to your website, I covered how to go to the 3 popular social networks, Facebook, Google+, or Twitter, and using their button generators to add some social networking aspects to your website.
In some cases this works great, but all the manual adding of these social media buttons can become tedious, and in some cases you might wish to add the ability to share to a whole slew of social networks, not just the ones you frequent.
This is when taking advantage of a social media plugin for your website can be a great way to easily add social network functionality, without all the leg work of running around setting everything up yourself.
WordPress Social Media plugins
WordPress has a wide array of social media plugins, here are a couple that we've written about so far:
The WordPress Social Contact Display plugin allows you to easily integrate a Facebook, Google+, Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube button to your WordPress website.
The WordPress Twine Social plugin allows you to link your social media accounts to the Twine service to display all of your posts across the various social networks in one place. Then you can include that feed with this WordPress plugin into your WordPress website.
Joomla Social Media plugins
So far we've only written about 1 Joomla social media plugin (extension) via a question on our public Q&A, but there will be more to come soon! You can always check out the Joomla Social Media extensions for more.
The Facebook like button can be easily added to your Joomla site by using the Module Manager and using the Custom HTML module. Actually any of the buttons from my add social media buttons to your site guide should work this way.
Drupal Social Media plugins
We only have 1 written article about Drupal social media plugins, but will be adding more over time! With Drupal you can also create a new block, and the follow the steps to add social media buttons to get the HTML code to place in that new block to have the buttons displayed.
The Facebook Like module for Drupal 7 would also allow you to easily integrate a Facebook like button into your Drupal site, and have some easy customization available for changing the look of the button.
