I've been a long-time fan and user of the Social Warfare plugin, which I'm pretty sure you're familiar with by now. However, when I recently redesigned Magnet4Blogging, I made the decision to look for a new social media/sharing plugin altogether. That's when I discovered Social Snap.
Let me start with saying that I still enjoy using Social Warfare, for the most part, I have the free version installed on a few of my other blogs and niche websites.
I discovered Social Snap after helping out a good friend of mine David Hartshorne. I was helping to integrate the buttons into his website.
It took me all of 10 minutes or so of exploring some of the options and features to fall in love with the plugin and decided then, this would be perfect for Magnet4Blogging, as a replacement for Social Warfare.
For complete transparency, I'm using the Plus version of Social Snap which I purchased with my hard-earned cash! So, nope, I wasn't paid to write this review, nor was I given a free copy of the plugin by the company.
In the past, I've happily reviewed dozens of products that I was given free access to, under the condition that I could be completely honest when creating the review.
The case with Social Snap is that I purchased a copy for myself.
There is, of course, a free version of Social Snap available from the WordPress repository which you can download and install into your WordPress website.
If you would like to learn more about Social Snap, you can do so here, on their website.
OK, so here's what we're going to cover in this short hands-on user-review of Social Snap.
OK, let's dive in.
Social Snap (Plus, Pro, and Agency) are powered-up versions of the free and light Social Snap social sharing plugin for WordPress. If you're familiar with Social Warfare, it's kind of a similar plugin, however, Social Snap offers a lot more in terms of features, tools, a badass UI, etc. More importantly, the team behind Social Snap seem to actually know what they're doing... For now.
Social Snap is used on over 70,000 WordPress websites, at the time of publishing this review.
The free version of Social Snap is a pretty hefty plugin, there's a lot of features included here. These include things like -
Of course, and naturally, with the premium (paid) versions, you get access to all of the above and over 30 additional share providers and 5 locations.
But that's just the start. You also get access to a plethora of additional tools, such as share count recovery, analytics integration, URL shortening, open graph, Twitter cards, custom share images, social meta, Click-to-tweet, social identity, social share on media, and much more.
One of the key features that drew me to the Social Snap Plus plugin and to want to use it on Magnet4Blogging was the way in which the buttons could be customized and displayed with very little effort or limitations.
I like to manually place buttons within a page template, blog template, archives template when I'm developing websites anyway, so this was particularly useful for me. In addition, the options for customizing the buttons themselves are plentiful.
For anyone savvy enough to know a little bit of CSS, you can really customize the buttons just the way you want. But, you really don't need to as you can use the default options to customize your buttons.
Here's a list of the customizability options waiting for you in Social Snap -
Another awesome feature which I love is the in-content Click-to-Tweet Gutenberg block which you can drop right into your content. Like the one below.
I'm a sucker when it comes to data and stats! Really, I am. You might think that's quite sad, but I don't care.
Social Snap (Premium) doesn't just provide you with beautiful, fully customizable sharing buttons to whack on your WordPress site, it also gives you a full suite of advanced analytical tools to help you grow your social followers. No, wait, not just grow your social followers, but also track your growth with clever reporting tools.
You can view simple stats like total shares, total click-to-tweet's, and total likes. In addition, you can dive deeper into your content historical social activity and view your growth chart, view the top-performing posts or pages and analyze views, shares, and likes for each of them.
But what does all this mean?
It means you can use the data to fine-tune your social campaigns in the future. If you know what types of content gets the best response on your social channels, shared at the right time, in the right context, you can continue growing your business on social media the smart way.
Importing If you have used another social plugin in the past, such as Social Warfare, you can import your share counts and settings over to Social Snap. See image below.
Here are some screenshots of the admin area in Social Snap.
If you really want to view the full list of features Social Snap premium has to offer, check out their pricing page here.
Whether you're deciding on the free version or one of the premium plans for using this plugin, I honestly get the warm feeling that Social Snap is going to become the new Kings of Social Sharing plugins. Again, purely my opinion. You might look at this and think - What a pile of cr*p. Each to their own, I know.
For me, and I think I can speak for many others too, having been let down by so many other premium companies creating their own version of a social sharing plugin, Social Snap seem to have gotten their sh*t right, at least for now.
I love, love, love the settings UI. It's attractive, clean, everything is where it should be and navigating around is a complete breeze. The statistics UI reminds me of Thrive Leads UI dashboard, which I like a lot.
If you're looking for a plugin that will give you more than just the ability to display some sharing buttons, I'm talking about a plugin that will provide you with the toolkit to actually customize your buttons, grow your social followers, and more importantly, track your progress with customized reports and analysis, then you should use Social Snap free, or the premium if you can justify the costs.
If you're simply looking to add some simple sharing buttons and be done with it, then the free one should do just fine, if not, there's plenty of other alternatives if Social Snap doesn't quite float your boat.
Help. That's all you need to remember. On their website, there's a simple navigational link in the main menu appropriately titled Help.
This will take you to Social Snap's full documentation page where you can access a plethora of reference materials and tutorials. There's also a troubleshooting guide, and if you're still stuck, you can always submit a ticket.
I want to be honest with you, I've not yet had the opportunity to experience their customer support, but should the occasion arise in the near future, I'll be sure to update this part of the review to let you know what I think of their support. For now, though, I'm a happy customer and user of Social Snap.
When it comes to choosing which social sharing plugin to use, we're certainly not limited to just a few.
What's currently available?
Well, we know there's Social Warfare which is the most popular with over 1 million downloads, so far, but after their recent escapade with unstable and website crashing updates of their plugin, you might have been forced to similarly find an alternative like I have.
If you want to check out some alternative social plugins, I wrote a detailed post here you can check out.
I honestly think it comes down to preferences, mainly. If you have experience with other plugins, you tend to stick with the one you like best.
For a while, Social Pug was my Number One Social Warfare alternative, and I used it for a little time on my blog. But, I had a little bit of trouble making the shortcode work in my Oxygen Builder Template, so I couldn't really use it.
There's also Easy Social Sharing Buttons, again, very powerful but packed with way too many features, half of which are useless. That was kind of the first premium social plugin I ever used.
OK, so let's get down to costs - You can also compare the cost of other rival social plugins below.
Social Snap Single Site Licence with 1-year support with NO addons - $39 (Currently $27 with 30% Off Sale)
Social Warfare Pro Single Site Licence - $29 (30% Off Renewals)
Social Pug Single Site Licence - $34
Easy Social Sharing Single Site Licence - $26 (For 12 months of support)
Other plans for Social Snap are -
Let's begin with the pros.
Wait for a minute, there's way too many to list here, seriously, and I'm not being overdramatic. I'm not looking for reasons to write just positive things about this plugin either, just so that you can be bowled over and purchase it for yourself so that I can make a quick commission. Not at all!
For the sake of it, here's what I think the pros of using Social Snap are -
And the cons?
Really? OK, here goes.
To wrap up this short review, I love Social Snap. I just hope that I am not let down in the future as I have been by using other social sharing plugins that I have fallen in love with.
Even though I've only had Social Snap installed on my blog for a month or so, I'm enjoying it, and I very much value the tools and stats which is helping me improve my blog post promotion campaigns through social media, and faster too. Great job, Social Snap team, highly recommended.
Affiliate Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links to Social Snap and various other premium social plugins. Should you click on one of these links to purchase a plugin, I will be paid a small commission, at no additional cost to you. Thanks for your continued support.
