10 WordPress Social Media Plugins You Can't Live Without

Any truly complete digital marketing plan will involve a website which has been optimized properly for all of the benefits which can be gained from social media. This includes being able to attract more visitors, building your brand and simply being able to spread your marketing message to the far corners of the Internet.

One of the main reasons the WordPress CMS is so popular is that any website based on this content management system can easily be optimized for social marketing with a variety of free plugins, with a wide range of premium plugins also available.

Here are some of our very favourite WordPress social media plugins for you to choose from:

Social Giveaway

Running competitions on social networks can be one of the easiest ways to build a huge following for your brand with little or no effort, and a minimal amount of expense too. The Social Giveaway plugin is a very easy-to-use social competition tool where you simply set up the number of steps competitors need to take before being able to win a prize. Please note that certain social networks have very strict rules about the types of competition you can run on them, if they allow competitions, period.

Shareaholic

Adding social media buttons to your website or blog can be a bit of a chore with most social plugins because they lack the ability to do much more than just display a set of boring buttons. Shareaholic takes the idea of social sharing a step further, and even manages to make the whole concept of sharing that bit sexier.

WordPress Ultimate Timeline

If you love the idea of having your very own timeline - the same kind featured on the world's biggest social network - then this plugin makes that entire process very easy for you. This plugin has great documentation, works with responsive themes and has excellent support.

WordPress 2 Instagram

Instagram might now be under the ownership of Facebook but that hasn't stopped millions of people using it every single day. Now you can combine the latest image feeds from Instagram seamlessly on your blog.

SmartYouTube Pro

Embedding YouTube videos on your website has never been easier, and with the viral value of really popular videos you can definitely encourage your visitors to stick around longer to take a look at all the cool videos you've found for them.

Commentifier

Running a blog is one thing, but having tons of people commenting on your blog posts is where the action is really at - in fact lots of comment activity on your WordPress blog can have tons of SEO (search engine optimization) benefits too. Commentifier also sends a short, personal email message to the person whose blog comment you've just replied to, which makes interacting with your blog audience very, very easy.

Twitter Feed

Not everyone pays as much attention to Twitter as they should, and if you really want to make your blog a social hub full of social buzz then you should install the Twitter Feed plugin. It displays your Twitter feed as an inline widget on your blog, works with tons of browsers, works with responsive themes and is very easy to set up and use.

Cirq Social

People are used to seeing links to social networks that look like every other link to a social network out there. In short most linking schemes are boring, but with Cirq you can make your links far more interactive and far more interesting and engaging as a result.

Twitch TV

If you're not already a Twitch fan then you can now prepare to say goodbye to the next few weeks of your life. Twitch is an online game streaming platform which has exploded in popularity over the last few years. Gamers love Twitch because they can show off their gaming prowess whenever they feel like it, but as a blog owner having great Twitch feeds displaying on your site can people hooked for hours. This Twitch plugin works using shortcodes, and has tons of features for you to experiment with.

Multi Facebook Pages Posts

Sharing what you've said or done on Facebook on your blog has never been easier thanks to this plugin. It also allows you to share the content of more than one of your Facebook pages in a single sidebar widget for your visitors to check out. We also love this plugin because of its great browser support.

We can pretty much guarantee that you'll find at least 3 or 4 plugins on this list you'll absolutely love - especially the Twitch plugin, we predict this to be one of the most popular plugins this year. So take some time out of your day, sit down and think which of the above plugins would most benefit your site.

Remember you're only a click or two away from a whole new world of interactivity for your WordPress site thanks to the above plugins.