This is my review of the Easy Social Share Buttons plugin for WordPress. One of the best alternatives to the Social Warfare plugin!
Please note: This review has not been updated for 2021.
When I launched this blog back in 2013, I was using a social sharing plugin called, Easy Social Share Buttons.
I'm currently using the Social Snap plugin, which I reviewed some time ago here. And before that plugin, I was using Social Warfare.
You're probably wondering why I have changed social plugins several times in the last ten years.
I stopped using ESSB many years back when I discovered Social Warfare, which was the better option for my blog at that time.
Social Warfare was only available as a premium plugin. Then sometime after, they decided to release a free version. Around the same time, things started to go downhill for Warfare Plugins.
Not to go into a great deal of detail, but around 2018, Warfare Plugins released an update that caused hundreds of WordPress websites using the Social Warfare plugin to crash after updating.
The company certainly felt the backlash from angry customers. I was one of those users, of course.
I decided to switch to a free and simple plugin like the Genesis Simple Share; however, this was only temporary. I never got around to switching back to either ESSB or Social Warfare again.
OK, short story over.
Since discovering the ESSB plugin for myself back in 2013, it has evolved and gone on to become an even more powerful plugin than it was before.
So let me start from the very beginning.
Easy Social Share Buttons is yet another social sharing plugin. When I say 'another,' this plugin has been around for some time.
It is an affordable plugin that will give you all the necessary tools you need to add gorgeous-looking buttons and socials sharing features to your WordPress website.
The ESSB plugin was created by Appscreo and is available to purchase on the Envato Marketplace. Click here to shop! (This is not an affiliate link).
To date, over 500,000 websites use Easy Social Share Buttons!
I know what you're thinking - Why pay for a premium plugin when you can use a free one?
There are some great free social plugins around - But, a paid-for plugin is the better option to go with. Let me explain why I think this.
Sadly, with most of the free plugins available today, you have little control over button customization and button placement. Not to mention the limited options you have for optimizing your content for social sharing.
Yes, is the short answer. However, 'too many' might be a little excessive. I would say it has quite a lot of features.
Some of those features are useful, others, I'm not so sure. And for none-techies, a lot of features can be quite overwhelming.
Easy Social Sharing Buttons plugin is currently in version 7.6
Here's a list of 'some' of the key features in the plugin:
As you can see, the ESSB plugin gives you a lot of options for adding, customizing, positioning, and configuring buttons into your WordPress site.
But that's not all. The plugin also comes with some useful list building and an opt-in form tool. But it doesn't stop there either.
Gasp!!!
Another useful feature in the ESSB button plugin is the built-in metrics and social analytics tools.
If social media data is important to your online strategy, you'll love using the social optimization tools in this plugin. If you don't give a rat's *ss, this feature will be useless to you!
You can generate and view reports for device type, create detailed button position reports, view detailed network reports, and much more. See the image below.
You can also do some cool split testing for your button placements using Easy Social Sharing Buttons.
This is a powerful feature if you want to learn which button configuration will give your content the most shares.
Once your testing is done, you'll have the data to view the conversion reports to decide which button placement will work best for your content in the future. See the image below.
Once again, Easy Social Share Buttons are simply crammed with way too many options and features for me to talk about each of them here. Therefore I would highly recommend that you check them out for yourself in more detail.
In addition to all of the features mentioned above, the latest version of the ESSB plugin also includes -
Asides from the ludicrous amount of features built into this plugin. Whatever your goal is for your online content promotion in 2020, a good reason to invest in Easy Social Sharing Buttons is that it's a premium quality plugin at the end of the day.
When you pay for premium, you expect to get premium. This includes -
Despite being feature-crammed, the creators of Easy Social Sharing Buttons claims that this is a blazing fast loading plugin!
Is it?
Well, you'll have to test the page loading speed of your site if you use this plugin to find out.
You would expect a plugin of this magnitude to be extremely expensive, right?
Well, it's not. It won't even break the bank!
Click here to learn more.
So let's take a look at some of the pros and cons of investing and using this plugin on your website.
Let's start with the Pros -
How about the cons? -
This is a plugin that will help you do three things essentially. Get more social shares of your content, grow your followers, and build your email list.
At first, it can be a little bit overwhelming finding your way around all the features and options, but once you have this setup you're good to go.
Many similar plugins of this kind struggle to even come close to what's on offer with Easy Social Sharing Buttons plugins, and from just $20 it's a steal.
If you're looking for a great alternative to the Social Warfare plugin for absolutely any reason, I would highly recommend trying the Easy Social Sharing Buttons plugin.
Enjoy!