At the beginning of 2014 I was redesigning dustn.tv as I do every year. One of the biggest hangups for me whenever I do a redesign has always been the social media buttons. This year, I wanted to try something different.
I had experimented with all kinds of social sharing buttons for WordPress. From JetPack to Digg Digg, AddThis, Share Daddy, and even gave Flare a try. All of them ended up falling short of what I was looking for.
In the process of my redesign, I ended up sending Nick a Photoshop version of my new blog design and I included custom designed social sharing icons. My question to him was, “how hard would these be to build?”
As could be expected, Nick’s response was, “not too hard.”
At the time it was simple a set of social sharing icons that looked really good. They weren’t responsive and they didn’t do anything but share the blog post or page that they were loaded on.
Before long Nick had the wild idea to actually turn this idea for a set of social media share buttons for dustn.tv into a full-fleged premium WordPress plugin.
Once that idea was on the table, a new series of ideas hit us. We started brainstorming all that this plugin could be and how it could solve all the different shortcomings in the space.
So we talked through all the pain points that bloggers (like ourselves) had when looking for a social sharing WordPress plugin. Here’s the pain points we decided to tackle first:
Beautiful
Besides functioning properly, the most important thing for me is that the social sharing buttons look attractive. Unappealing, buggy-looking, out-dated, or flat out ugly buttons can really screw up a great website design.
Additionally, if your buttons don’t look like what people are used to seeing from those social networks, or if they’re too far gone from what the official buttons look like, they may not get clicked.
So when I designed my buttons I wanted them to be recognizable, consistent with each networks branding, and uniform so they don’t look hacked together.
Responsive
Since social sharing buttons became a thing, a lot has changed. The mobile revolution has left the majority of social sharing plugins in the dust.
Most side-floating social share buttons are either completely lost off-screen on mobile, or they get pushed over top of the content that a user is trying to read. Why would someone share what they can’t read?
The only other option was to keep the buttons at the very top or at the very bottom leaving a very limited screen area for the reader to share your content. This was just a bummer for me.
Our social share buttons needed to not only be beautiful, but they had to be beautiful no matter what size screen they showed up on.
Custom Descriptions
At the time, I realized that social content was becoming bland and cookie-cutter. I also knew that Pinterest was booming and I wasn’t getting much benefit.
So I wanted a way to be able to craft the social shares so that when someone clicks a button it’s more than just a headline and a link.
I hadn’t found any plugin that allowed me to do that.
Sure, Yoast will allow you to create custom meta descriptions but I wanted to customize what was actually shared.
Specifically I wanted to customize the tweet, Pinterest description and I wanted to be able to upload a Pinterest-specific image that will automatically be pulled in when the Pin button was used.
Tweet This Quote!
I had been using ClickToTweet.com on occasion to create custom quotes in my blog posts that people could just click and tweet instantly. This was cumbersome and took up way too much time.
Luckily the people over at Coschedule had created a nifty WordPress plugin that solved this issue. But it was another plugin I had to download and maintain when all I wanted was all my social sharing plugins to work together!
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One of the biggest problems with social sharing plugins is that they can completely bog down your sites performance. They have to load lots of files and scripts to get the functionality for every button adding a lots of bulk.
I’m very picky with plugins in general as having too many of them can be a problem. A plugin that kills your sites load time is never worth it.
I needed something that did everything else and didn’t destroy my site load time.
Good luck right?
So Let’s Build This Thing!
With Social Warfare we’ve effectively solved every single one of these pain points. We’ve built a social sharing plugin for WordPress that:
- Looks gorgeous
- Is beautifully responsive
- Allows you to customize shared content
- Allows for custom (hidden from the page) Pinterest images
- Adds click-to-tweet functionality
- Loads lightning quick
It’s been 9 months in the making and we’ve finally gotten to release it into the wild. And we’ve only just begun with feature updates.
It’s a very exciting time for our team, and seeing the testimonials pour in are getting us even more excited!
“Once I started using Social Warfare I straight away saw a jump in traffic to my site and engagement on social platforms.” – Robert Ryan
That gets us out of bed in the morning.
What started as a simple way to solve our own pain points has become a mission to put a social sharing arsenal into the hands of every blogger and website owner that we can.
Hey Dustin,
I noticed the Total Shares count “jump down” to the second line when hovering quickly above some of the buttons. I sent some screenshots to your support, but it’s been 3-4 days and I get no reply.
Also, if you could put up the option to put floating sidebar in desktop and bottom/top bar in mobile (like Monarch offers), that would rock.
Hi Regev,
Social Warfare has this feature built in now. In fact it’s updated version is better than Monarch.
Thanks!
Good choice to build this plugin yourself. I would chose a custom-tailored approach as well. Unfortunately that would mean keeping check on our change that social networks make to their code. So a plugin that does this for you would be ideal. My only concern would be the performance issue. Anyway to check this with a before/after comparison?
Performance is a huge priority for me, and as far as I can tell, ours is the fastest performing social sharing plugin on the market. You can read a little bit about that here: https://warfareplugins.com/better-faster-stronger/
Is it retina ready?
It’s built entirely with CSS, so– pixel perfect on every screen. 😀
Only for wordpress? and, blogger platform? Any plan in the future?
Yes, Sandor, we are only building WordPress plugins for the foreseeable future.
Subscribed to your blog, thank you
Awesome, thanks!
Hey Dustin!
I purchased social ware fare about a month ago and I have been loving it! You have done a beautiful job creating such a sleek look….It seems as though things have changed though… Did you change the look of the icons? I’m not really excited about the way it looks now and I can’t seem to change it back. I would love to have the old look back ????
Hi Rhosael! As long as you’re on the most current version (currently 1.3.16) of the plugin (and have updated/cleared all caches) the icons should look exactly the same as they have. Are you on the most current version and seeing different icons?
Hmm yes I am weird not sure what then! I re installed it last night but same thing!
Looks very intriguing Dustin.
Does the plugin have the ability to have the share buttons at multiple places? For example, can I have it on the start AND the end of the post? And does the plugin also provide any pop-ins?
Lastly, I noticed on your blog that you have outlined boxes whereas here are solid colored boxes (which I like better). How many “styles” of social media buttons do you offer?
Hi David! Great questions!
Yes, you have the option to place the buttons on posts/pages at the top, bottom or both top and bottom. You can also use the shortcode to place them anywhere on any page. We do not have pop-ins though.
There are currently 6 different button shapes, 8 different color sets (including the ability to do custom fill color or custom outlines colors) and you can control both the static and hover states with those options. This gives a potential of over 5,000+ combinations.
We are interested to use Warfare plugin, it’s beautiful! Can’t wait to push the buy button 🙂
Currently we are using Sumo Share (which is your close competitor now), but I think it’s overpriced. We decided to move soon.
Thanks a lot Berbagi!
Hi Dustin! Really loving this plugin from what I’ve read here and on other sites as well. It seems like this blog post reveals some of the functionality in live form (sharing buttons below, for example) – but I’d love to see a full demo somewhere. Am I just missing it on the site? Thanks for the help!
Hi Keiko! Yes, you can see our buttons in action first hand on this site. The challenge we have though is that a traditional “Demo” site is very tricky to accomplish for our product for a number of reasons, one of those reasons being that most of the functionality is on the back end. But we’re working on a solution, and it will be up as quickly as we can make it happen.
Where I can get socail buttons like yours?
Just click the Buy Now button at the top of the page. 😀
I’m buying this very soon. It’s exactly what I need.
Please don’t abandon this plugin. It’s GREAT!
Oh, we’re not going anywhere but up Shane. 😀
Indeed you are. Just purchased 😉
It works perfectly! You’re the MAN!!!
Woot! Woot! Woot! Woot!
Just what I was looking for, was looking for a light weight solution so going to give Simple Share Buttons Adder a try… Thanks!
I will most definitely be checking this out soon, looks awesome!
Good deal Tumi! Let me know if you’d like a personal demo!
Can you please tell me how can i purchase it via credit card?
Hi webmasterfsd! Currently you can pay via credit card through PayPal. We’re investigating alternative payment methods at the moment, but as of now that’s the only option.
Dude, great looking social share plugin. I love the clean simple design.
Thanks Steven!
I’m about to purchase this Dustin, I was wondering about Buffer is that on the list as well. So far it looks great.
Chip we’ve had a couple requests for Buffer integration. While Buffer is one of my tools of choice, we’re just not sure if it makes sense to add to the sharing options. Mostly because my inclination is that those who would hit the Buffer button would likely already have the Buffer extension installed and could just as easily use that.
Another reason is that so far as we can tell, the Buffer API is returning duplicate share numbers. Since we pull numbers directly from each social network, those numbers will always be accurate. If we were to integrate Buffer as well, the numbers would be slightly dishonest because it would be counting the shares made through Buffer twice. We haven’t tested this to be sure yet, but we’ve got it on the experimentation list.
Love the story behind this plugin. I’ve been impressed with the plugin for quite some time. Admiring it on your website, Dustin, and then on blogphoto.tv.
I think what excites me the most is the people behind the plugin. You, Nicholas and Jason have very high standards and don’t do anything halfway.
I know the graphics will always be up to date. I know the plugin will be kept running smoothly. I know that the support is phenomenal.
You gentlemen knocked it out of the park!
Thank you so much Carrie-Anne! 😀