If you’re not running a WordPress blog, then social sharing plugins might be out of your reach. While there’s plenty of those available for free download, there’s also plenty of jQuery plugins for social media sharing and social optimization. jQuery is best known as an animation framework for doing all kinds of cool things with your website. There’s really very little that jQuery can’t do. Social media is the second most important asset in marketing after the content itself. If you’re not using social media to promote your content, then you’re clearly leaving many untapped opportunities on the table.
Nowadays, there is so much versatility in how people share their content. The leading media publisher websites use their own techniques. Therefore, there is no one universal approach to adding social sharing buttons to blogs and websites. It helps to have options, and jQuery surely delivers plenty of those!
Thanks to the hard work of developers, we were able to put together the best jQuery/JavaScript social media sharing plugins. We weeded out the weak links and made sure that each of these plugins provides a unique social sharing experience on your site. Majority on this list are open source and thus allow customizations.
Social Share Privacy
User privacy is a popular topic of discussion among web experts who have grown tired of how social networks track information about website users, oftentimes without their direct consent. Even if nobody is clicking on the social share buttons on your website, the social platforms are able to track information. While not an immediate threat, it’s still uncomfortable to know that social platforms are doing this. So, a number of developers are taking it upon themselves to find a solution.
The Social Share Privacy jQuery plugin addresses those concerns directly. The idea it’s built upon is straightforward. Instead of getting the usual colorful social icons, you can add gray icons that act as static placeholders. Only until the user clicks on one of the icons will any information be sent out to the social network.
So, what happens is that you give your users the control over sharing their information elsewhere. Once clicking on a gray icon, they understand that their information will be shared with that particular social network. This plugin users can choose from a range of options. These include Disqus, Flattr, Hacker News, and all of the traditional social platforms known today.
Social Likes
Most webmasters seem to think that social share buttons need to be flashy. This couldn’t be farther from the truth. When it comes to online content, the key component is quality. Quality content naturally results in social shares, so it won’t matter how or where you place your buttons. If people like something, they will be happy to pass it forward. This isn’t the case for viral websites, though, since such platforms usually attract millions of likes anyway.
Social Likes integrates a selection of three color schemes and three alignment positions for social sharing buttons on your site. Select from classic, flat, or traditional transparent layouts. Then, position your buttons horizontally, vertically, or as a single share button. You can also choose to show or not to show the social share counts, to provide a Twitter username, or to switch off certain networks altogether. This plugin has a friendly user interface. Use it as a standalone or as a built-in for your next web platform project.
jsSocials
jsSocials has had a run for a couple of years now. It is finally reaching a phase in its development where the buttons have become perfectly designed to be appropriate even for the most complex of designs. It’s amazing how far developers are willing to go to provide the open-source community with widgets and plugins such as this one. jsSocials users can select from four predefined designs optimized for maximum design visibility in a multitude of situations. Choose from flat, classic, minimal, or plain designs to best suit your needs. Don’t worry about the buttons’ sizes as the plugin will accommodate pretty much any result that you’re trying to achieve.
goodshare.js
goodshare.js is a practical jQuery library for displaying modern social sharing buttons on your blog, publishing platform, or website. Through customization, anyone can use this plugin through a content delivery network. You can optimize the appearance in a number of different ways. Further, you can integrate it with search engine requirements, including fast performance. You can add share counts using the API from Open Share Count. The colors for the buttons reflect the color scheme of the individual social networks. Templating is rather easy, and you can add custom buttons for specific networks through a traditional “button” or “ahrefs” style of tagging.
Simple Sharing Buttons Generator
Not in the mood to mess around with custom scripts and configurations? Well then, the easiest solution is to use a generator, and we’ve found one just for you. The process is rather simple. First, select a style of icons that best reflects your website’s design. Next, choose the networks you want to display sharing buttons for (Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, WordPress, etc.). Finally, you have to specify your website info, like the URL and the page description. You may also provide your Twitter username. While this approach seems painful at first, you only have to do it once to grab the configuration parameters for setting up all your other URLs. Because this is an open-source project, anyone can contribute something to it through a revision.
Sharrre
At first glance, the Sharrre plugin doesn’t look like much, but you’ll quickly realize how constructive it really is. The features that stand out are the configuration and personalization options. It also provides a solid performance optimization that doesn’t slow your pages down. Sharrre has a library of different demo examples. Some are traditional, while others resemble a jumbo-like sharing widget that provides a big share counter at the top of the widget. For data scientists, there’s an option to show social shares in a pie chart fashion. If you’re a technical blogger, the documentation outlines how you can configure each individual button with custom settings.
Socialite
Not many social sharing widgets talk about the performance load that they put on the site. It’s often not because of the code that’s powering the plugin but because of how long it can take for certain social sharing websites to load in the background.
The approach these days has been slightly different. It applies external counter APIs to load sharing data externally, but it can be modified to cache the results, too. The buttons themselves are designed locally, so you don’t have to fetch data from Facebook or Twitter. Another option is to lazy-load your sharing buttons if you do enjoy using the official ones. This way, the buttons will automatically show up on the site regardless. However, to share a post, users will have to hover over a particular button and it will lazy load at that moment. This, in turn, saves you any external performance points that you would lose out on otherwise. The buttons use custom classes to load. So, check before you assign a class that won’t overlap with existing classes on your style sheet.
Share42
Share42 is another grounded generator of social buttons for websites of any type. First, you have to decide on the size of the buttons, of which there are three choices. Then, you have more than 40+ social network buttons to choose from that you know will perform well on your website. After that, you need to work through the custom options. Do you want your buttons to be vertical sticky or plain horizontal? After making your choice, you can either download the final script or preview it in your browser.
AddThis
AddThis has appeared on Colorlib on multiple occasions. We outlined this platform as one of the best social media sharing tools for global-style websites. It’s also a reputable social engagement platform for business owners online. The success of AddThis goes back many years, way before developers were spending time and money to build custom scripts. A large portion of that existing user base has never left AddThis for anything else. It was only in the last three years that the developers and designers working for AddThis started to make a switch to modern features that reflect current standards in the web.
From simple floating buttons to carefully integrated buttons for your visual content, you can choose to show buttons anywhere on your site with only a few configuration options. The range of social platforms is endless. So, your content will naturally get the chance to be exposed to a larger audience.
Simple Share Buttons
Did you ever plan on investing for a social sharing script? Once you go through the demo of Simple Share Buttons, you might consider doing so. This mobile-first and responsive script provides a selection of more than 10 unique and most popular social networks out there. Use custom shortcodes to display your sharing buttons anywhere on the design of the site. If you’re keen on keeping track of your performance, you can opt to track the clicks that are being sent your way. This way, you can understand how each post is being shared across which networks. It does work for WordPress, so you can take it for a spin without an investment. If you do invest, you get even more options for customizing the script for a personalized experience.
Shareaholic
Developers built Shareaholic more than seven years ago to test the waters for social exposure on the web. It quickly grew into a self-sustainable platform that reaches 500,000,000 users on a monthly basis. Hundreds of thousands of websites, blogs, and content platforms depend on Shareaholic for precise sharing buttons that deliver a stellar user experience. Before you get access to the actual widget, you have to go through a series of options to personalize it.
The process is as follows. First, you choose from a theme and a headline you’d like to use. Then, you have to decide the button position, layout, size, and final alignment. Also, choose whether to show counters or not. You can customize all icon colors or use the default that each network uses generally. Through a single click, you can add or remove social services to tailor the sharing experience to your audience’s needs.
donReach Social Tools
We did a brief mention of donReach on their versatile API for collecting share counts, but did you know that they also provide their own social share buttons? These responsive mobile-friendly bad boys will add a unique twist to your website design, and since so few websites are using these buttons at the moment, it could really add that sense of authenticity that you need in these modern publishing times. First you select from a drag&drop interface the way that you want to position your buttons, whether you want to show shares first or last, and you can position each social network in its own position, with the ability to limit the buttons to a certain number, and show the other buttons using a plus sign. You can choose from icons, long and short button styles.
Social Warfare
Social Warfare is limited to WordPress websites only, but that shouldn’t stop you from consider this concise sharing plugin for yourself. Built with the vision of fast performance and easy social sharing, the Social Warfare plugin has become somewhat of an framework in the recent years. Their latest version pins down any common issues and problems that people would experience when adding sharing to their content sites, but that isn’t the only thing that Social Warfare excels at. Their button design is unmatched in terms of quality, and you can use custom widgets to create things like Popular Posts widgets based on the number of shares that your posts are getting. Whether you want to put your buttons at the top, middle or bottom part of your content, it only takes a single shortcode to make it happen.
Premium jQuery Plugins for Social Sharing
So that’s about the number of free jQuery social sharing plugins that you will find anywhere on GitHub, or personal resources published by developers. Since majority of websites these days are run on WordPress, mostly people use the WordPress plugin directory to find social plugins for them, while more professional websites will usually code their own custom scripts to integrate with a particular design ideology. There are more ways to utilize social media for growth though, and they don’t always come from the same place (such as the free market), so in light of that we will shift over the focus to premium grade jQuery scripts, plugins and libraries that will add extra special functionality to your websites, within the scope of social media.
Share This Image
Not all sharing widgets have to be about sharing your web page links only, and during the last several years there has been an expansive growth of how content gets shared on social media, and amongst the most prominent trends has been the process of sharing visual images, whether the featured image or images within the content, because social networks have now in-built support tools for showing images in a beautiful featured manner.
Share This Image is a handy jQuery script for adding a ‘share this image’ button to your visual content, whenever a visitor will scroll over an image they will get the usual style sharing buttons for sharing the image, rather than the link alone, on their social media. Right now the plugin supports sites like Pinterest, Facebook, Digg, Tumblr, Google Plus, Twitter, and a few others. Through the settings you can specifiy the minimum image size which can be shared, and there’s an option to customize the title, and description of each image that user wants to share.
LiveSmart Video Chat
If you would like to bring your customer service to a whole new level, LiveSmart Video Chat will do the trick. While it aims toward video chats, it sure does not miss supporting audios, too. On top of that, with LiveSmart Video Chat, you can also record conversations, share screens and even share files. LiveSmart Video Chat has its own push notifications that are based on Socket.io or Rachet PHP websocket libraries as well.
Indeed, LiveSmart Video Chat is no joke. There are a whole bunch of amazing features that this tool sports and you can take them all to your advantage. Of course, LiveSmart Video Chat is also entirely mobile-friendly and cross-browser compatible. You can now easily add a powerful and entirely customizable contact button to your website and get the live chats going.
Instagram Feed
To boost your website experience, all you might do is add an Instagram feed to it. Instead of wondering how to make it happen, pick Instagram Feed jQuer plugin and see the magic happen. No need to be building it from scratch when Instagram Feed does most of the work for you. It fetches images from any Instagram account and displays them on your page real-time. Correct, when you publish new content to your Instagram account, Instagram Feed will display it on your website or blog, too.
Some of the features of Instagram Feed are 100% mobile-ready layout, breakpoints, load more button and an option to display likes and comments. Additionally, you can also modify Instagram Feed however you see it match your main theme best. You can change the number of columns, customize color, alter corner radius and loads more.
Share Buttons
While some predefined themes have it already integrated, if you are building your own page, you can use Share Buttons to bring social media to your web space. This social media jQuery plugin enables your visitors and users to share the content they dig on their social media. Indeed, Share Buttons supports all the major platforms, like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest and WhatsApp to name a few.
In the Share Buttons bundle, you will find all the buttons necessary, horizontal and vertical positioning, as well as an option to show or hide any button. The tool also automatically detects page title and description which a person can then use to share on their social accounts. Last but not least, feel free to perform customization tweaks and fine-tune the look of the buttons according to your preference.
Kontackt
Whoever is already a loyal user of Kontackt, he or she can now expand the tool’s capabilities with a real-time application for push notifications and messaging. With the two amazing products, you can now effortlessly create a sophisticated online platform that you can turn into your own social network platform. Of course, you can make it a generic one or even go niche specific. The option is yours, Kontackt is powerful, practical and easy to use so all users get the most out of it without a hassle. If you would like to make things entirely your way, you now know where to start.
Serverless InstaFeed
Hence the name, you can now incorporate a fantastic Instagram feed without the necessity to use a server. Serverless InstaFeed is an excellent social media jQuery plugin that will elevate your website or blog’s appearance with an attention-grabbing gallery. Let your Instagram content decorate your page and keep your visitors engaged. All you need to do is to insert a snippet into your HTML code and most of the work is already done.
Serverless InstaFeed comes with a bunch of different layouts, like grid, infinite scroll and slider. You can also retrieve Instagram content based on usernames, hashtags and even location. Moreover, you can freely modify the number of columns, rows, set spacing and enhance the default layout to your likings however you fancy. There truly are unlimited options and possibilities you have with Serverless InstaFeed; use it to its full potential.
Diamond Social Feed
Crafting unique and creative galleries becomes a piece of cake with the use of Diamond Social Feed. This cracking jQuery plugin is full of amazing features and functions that will get you going in little to no time. It is also perfectly in tune with some of the most popular social media platforms for your convenience. While Diamond Social Feed comes with multiple predefined layouts and options, it also gives you complete freedom to create your own variations in a breeze.
First and foremost, Diamond Social Feed is 100% customizable and easy to use. Moreover, it contains over sixty different style settings for you to quickly come up with the right look for your online space. No doubt, every gallery you will set up with Diamond Social Feed will be 100% responsive, flexible and compatible with all modern web browsers.
Soch Social Chat Support
If you are running a service-based business, software or even an eCommerce website, do consider adding a social chat feature. With this, all your existing and potential users and customers can talk to you real-time using their social media. In other words, deliver top-notch customer support and win them over. With Soch Social Chat Support, you can now introduce Skype, WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger chats either in a separate chat function or combined.
When using Soch Social Chat Support jQuery plugin, you can set time availability so they know when to find you online. Also, you can preset custom messages for both when you are online and offline. Soch Social Chat Support also comes with full-blown documentation for easier and faster integration. Last but not least, the plugin works with all devices, templates and browsers for your convenience.
Socsh Infographic Social Share & Follow
Socsh has an original approach to displaying your social media links on your website. Meaning, if you would like to go against the norm and stand out from the masses, let Socsh do its thing. This social media jQuery plugin is straightforward to configure and make it look like part of your website since the beginning. It comes with loads of different icons which you can take to your full advantage. Out of the box, Socsh also supports eight different social networks, like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Google+ and more. Of course, there is no need to show all the buttons; you can hide some if you are not actively using.
The code of Socsh is organized and user-friendly. It makes sure even someone who does not have too much experience to bring this creative approach to social sharing and following to their pages.
Social Locker
Can’t say that we are big fans of social media lockers for content, but there is definitely a major appeal for them. The fact that this Social Locker has 1,200 sales does speak for itself. What are they anyway, social lockers? These widgets are created to lock a user out of your content pages and content rows unless they share your content on social media, this can be a quick way to garner up massive amounts of social media exposure, but it might come at the cost of visitors leaving your site before reading the full page, and Google is definitely improving its algorithm to crack down on sites that block users from viewing the content fully. However, the appeal is there and perhaps your site is in a particular niche where this kind of a script would be made useful. Viral websites could definitely put this plugin to use.
