Social Warfare Plugin Why I Use It, Set Up and Customization Tips

Social Warfare Plugin – Why I Switched

As I mentioned when I first started this blog, I was using the Monarch social sharing plugin. I was happy with it as it was doing what I needed it to do.

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At the time I wasn’t focusing that much on social marketing. However, I knew that if I wanted people to share my blog posts, I had to make it easy for them to do. The Monarch plugin makes it easy to add social icons to your WordPress blog.

Related posts on the Social Warfare Plugin:

• Is Social Warfare the Right Plugin for You?
• Steal My Pinterest Image Creation System for Social Warfare
• How I Customized the Click to Tweet on Social Warfare
• How to Set Up The Free Social Warfare Plugin

I was happy with the Monarch plugin and had no reason to spend the money on the Social Warfare plugin.

However, when I added the Thrive Content Builder to my website, I started having issues. For some reason, those two plugins weren’t playing nice together.

Instead of pulling out my hair and trying to figure out what was causing the issue, I decided to ditch the Monarch plugin. Since I started using this plugin, I am no longer having issues with any of my plugins.

So long story short, I only switched because I didn’t want to spend senseless hours trying to figure out why I was having issues with the plugins. Read this if you want to know “Is Social Warfare the right plugin for you?”

However, after setting up and using the plugin, I am really glad that I made the switch. I know you’re thinking, why would I spend the money on a social plugin, when I can download a free one?

Well, let me walk you through the setup and the customization process and even show you what this plugin does.

Then you can decide for yourself if this is the right plugin for you. Don’t forget to check out my Pinterest image creation system I use to get my images created quickly for every blog post I publish.

I’m not trying to persuade you to change your mind either way. I just know that overall, I am happy that I made the switch. Don’t feel like you need to buy the pro version if you don’t want to.

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Setting Up The Social Warfare Plugin

Once you purchase the plugin, you will need to log into your membership dashboard and download the zipped file. Don’t forget to grab your license so you can activate it. If you are new to WordPress be sure to read my beginners guide to WordPress plugins.

As soon as you activate the plugin you will find it on the left-hand side of the navigation bar.

Click on it and let’s begin the setup process.

Setting Up The Display

This section allows you to setup how you want the social icons to display on your WordPress blog.

Social Networks: Choose the social networks that you use and drag those icons to the top where it says active.

You will have the option of sorting the manually or you can choose to sort the dynamically. I’ve elected to sort mine manually.

Share Count: Turn them on to show your social share counts.

Twitter Cards: I turned mine on.

Position Share Buttons: You can choose the positioning of the share buttons on different post types via the main dashboard.

You will have the option to choose how you want it displayed on each individual post and page you publish.

[thrive_2step id=’860′][/thrive_2step]

Image Hover Button: This allows you to add hover “pin” button to your images. This makes it easier for people to share your images to Pinterest. Set it to on.

Yummly Display Control: I am not really sure what this does, so I left it as default.

If you’ve followed along, we are now moving to the styles tab.

Setting Up The Styles

Scroll back to the top and click on the styles tab.

Let’s run through each individual option and show you how I set them up.

Visual Options: allows you to select the look and feel of your buttons.

Total Counts: Customize the look of your social share counts. You can choose the decimal separator, decimal places and if you want your counts left or right aligned.

Floating Share Buttons: allow you to choose if you want the social icons to float to the top, bottom or the left side of your page.

Click-to-Tweet Style: choose the visual theme that you want to use for your click to Tweets.

Setting Up Social Identity

This section is where you enter the usernames and URLs for your social networking sites.

You will need to create a Facebook App ID to connect it to your Facebook page or profile. If you’ve never created one before, you can read this tutorial.

Setting Up Advanced Settings

This is the section where you will turn on your analytics and sign up set up your link shortener.

Frame Buster: I believe it is pre-set to on, if not slide it to on.

Bitly Link Shortening: Allows you to automatically shorten all your links. You will need to have a Bitly account to use this feature. You can sign up here.

Analytics Tracking: Turn them on if you tracking.

Share Recovery: allows you to recover your social share counts if your permalink structure ever changes or if you move from HTTP to HTTPS later on.

We work hard to get our content shared and the last thing you want to do is lose those counts.

To use the feature, follow the guide they have provided inside the dashboard of your site.

Caching Method: I left this as default.

Registration Tab

This section is where you enter the valid license you received when you purchased the Social Warfare plugin.

Tweet Count Registration: allows you to turn on your Twitter counts. Follow the prompts and it will walk you through step by step on how to do this.

That’s how you setup the Social Warfare social sharing plugin. Now it’s time to start using the power of the plugin.

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What Makes It Powerful

When I was using the Monarch social plugin, I didn’t get to choose what people shared. When people clicked on the images that I had on my website, that is what got shared to the social networks.

The plugin did not allow me to control the content or the images that people shared.  It’s your website, shouldn’t you be able to control what people share?

Well, that’s what makes the Social Warfare plugin different from any other social plugin that I’ve seen.

You get full control over the content and images that people share on your blog.

Setting Up Images and Content You Want To be Shared

In order to have complete control over what people share, you are going to have to set up the images and content on every post and page you write.

Let me show you what I mean.

On my WordPress Plugin tutorial post, I’ve set up the images and content that I want to be shared whenever someone shares that post.

It doesn’t matter which image they click on my post, the only image that gets shared is the one that I’ve designated below.

It’s going to require you to set up a specific image that you want to share for each individual post. However, you can be sure that the same image is getting shared.

This means that you can put your URL on that image and it will drive more traffic back to your blog.

This means that I had to create a social media image with the dimensions of 1,200px x 628px.

This is the image that will get shared whenever someone shares my content to LinkedIn, Facebook, Google+ and Twitter.

If you want people to share your image to Pinterest you will need to create an image and add it to the Pinterest image.

The recommended Pinterest image dimensions are: 735×1102.

Once you add your images, don’t forget to add the content that you want to be shared as well. Yup, you can even control the content you want to be shared.

Why You Should Control What People Share

It’s your WordPress blog and chances are you are trying to build your brand and audience. There’s no better way to do that than to share images with your URL.

If you write a lot of online tutorials like I do, then you might have a lot of images on your WordPress blog that you really don’t want to be shared.

They don’t have your URL and they won’t help build your brand online.

This plugin makes it easy to control which images get shared. All you have to do is setup the image with your URL. This makes it easy for people to see your website URL and hopefully go visit your site.

Customizing The Social Icon Colors

When I first set up my website, I was using the default colors of the plugin. However, as I continued working on making the colors of my website flow naturally.

I wanted to change the colors of the icons to match the colors on my site.

I couldn’t find an easy way to do this from inside the dashboard. So I decided to do it via CSS and I thought I would share this with you in case you’re using this plugin and have been wanting to change the colors, but just didn’t know how.

Instead of walking you through the whole process, I am just going to show you what code I used.

I grabbed this code from the CSS style sheet of the plugin.

Highlight the code and drop it the child theme of your site, that way when the plugin gets updated, you won’t lose your styles. If you’re new to WordPress and don’t feel comfortable messing with your files, I recommend you make a backup of you website.

Here’s the code I changed:

This will change the color of the Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Google+ social icons.

These are the only social icons I use on my WordPress blog.

You will want to change the background color and the border colors to a hex color that matches your website.

Finding the CSS Styles for Other Icons

If you are sharing to more social sites than I am, you will have to go the Social Warfare plugin and grab those styles and add them to your stylesheet.

Let me show you what you need to do.

Open up your FTP client and head on over to the public_html folder of the website you have the plugin installed.

Locate the Social Warfare plugin folder via the wp_content folder of your website. If you’re brand new and don’t know how to work with plugins, read this tutorial.

This is what you will see when you’re inside of the Social Warfare plugins folder.

Open up the style.css file with your favorite text editor.

You can find the start of the social sharing icons around line 318.

Scroll down till you see the social sharing sites that you’re sharing to.

Highlight the code, don’t delete it from the plugin file. Just copy the code with CTRL + C on PC and Command + C on Mac.

Head on over to your child theme’s style sheet and paste it in there so it looks like this:

Save the changes and upload the file back to your server. You may have to clear your cookies on your browser in order to see the changes.

Now you should see that the social icons from the Social Warfare plugin match the colors of your website.

I couldn’t find an easier way built into the plugin to help me change the color of the social icons. So this is how I changed mine to match the colors of my WordPress blog.

[thrive_2step id=’860′][/thrive_2step]

After I wrote this tutorial, I got an email stating that they just updated the plugin to Version 2.2.

Version 2.2

The plugin is now offered as a standalone free plugin. In order to update to the paid version, you will be required to install the Social Warfare Pro Addon plugin, along with the standalone Social Warfare core plugin.

The developers have chosen to take the plugin add-ons route because it will enable them as well as third party developers to extend the functionality of the plugin.

Eventually, WordPress users will be able to add on extra features in an a la carte manner.

The setup features are the same as the previous version. The only difference is that now you can try out the plugin for free. I am not sure if the free version gets the same setup features as the pro version?

So if you’ve been holding off trying this powerful plugin, now is your chance.

Download it from here and take it for a spin and see if it’s the right social sharing plugin for you. Click here.

Final Takeaway

When setting up your WordPress blog it’s important to have complete control of what people are sharing. This ensures that all the images and content people are sharing are pointing others back to your website.

Plus this WP share plugin makes it so easy for people to help you spread the word about your content. Even if you don’t like using social media, you need it to help you grow your blog.

It’s NOT vital to get the social icons to match the color of your website. I just thought I would include that in case you wanted to learn how I changed mine.

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If you’re still trying to find the right social plugin for your site, I not only recommend this plugin, but I use it as well. You can pick it up here. Are you using a Social Plugin? Which plugin are you using and are you happy with it?