Transcription
For now, let’s go ahead and check out this online content widget that we just set up. Go and check out some posts and sure enough here, our share icons right above the post. So everything is working right out of the box, as smooth as you’d expect. What’s up, everybody, it’s Dave here from Profitable Tools today. We’re talking about social media sharing. You know, there’s little buttons you see on your website, helps spread your contents all over the Web.
Now, I’ve kind of mixed feelings about plug ins like this because I personally don’t find myself using them. However, I’ve said this in the past. If I don’t see them on a site, I think subconsciously it kind of invalidates the site’s credibility just a little bit. So I think social sharing is important. And we’ve got a brand new comer to the WordPress scene for social sharing buttons. This is Novashare, they say WordPress social sharing at the speed of light.
So this is entirely based around the idea of having a very light weight sharing plug in, which, of course, I appreciate. I’m always looking for a faster website, and I’m sure you are as well. Now, the option out there that they’re competing with is social warfare, which is a pretty hefty plug in it, both in terms of it’s a little bit bulky to use, but it’s also expensive. So let’s go ahead and take a look at Novashare.
It’s a new kid on the block. Let’s see how they hold up. Now, before we get into Novashare, I should point out that the folks behind PERF Matters is actually the same team behind Novashare. So they definitely know a little bit about building fast WordPress websites because that’s what they do here with Proff matters. All right, enough talk. Let’s go ahead and get this thing set up. I’ve already installed the plug in. It lives over in the settings folder.
We’ll go over to Novashare. Now we’ve got three different elements. We can have inline contents, a floating bar, as well as click to tweet. Let’s go ahead and set each one up. First of all, in line content, I can toggle it on and then choose what types of posts I want this widget to display on post pages and any other custom post types you might have. For now, I’ll just leave it as a post. Let’s go over to the social networks category here.
I can choose what types of social networks I want my content shared on maybe Pinterest. How about Reddit and why not a print option as well as an email option? Now it’s important to note that I can actually move these around and rearrange them so you can do it in the order that you think your audience would prefer. Under a button position, you can have the social sharing buttons be above the content, below the content, above and below the content.
Or don’t add to content, which I’m not really sure what that option means. OK, so they don’t add to content. Option is useful if you’re using the inline shortcuts so you can still configure things here, but just not automatically added to the content. You can do it on a shortcode basis. Next up, we can set a mobile breakpoint and then you can actually toggle on and off the icons based on whether or not the viewer has a bigger or smaller device than the breakpoint.
So if I turn on high above breakpoint and I’m on a desktop with a nice big screen, I will not see the icons. However, if I turn on hyd below break point, if I’m on a mobile phone, I will not see the social sharing icons. Some basic styling options here like button size and button shape. We can see you have small, medium, large options and then you can choose between square rounded or circular icons. You can choose the background color of the social icons as well as the hover color.
So if you don’t like the default colors, you can override that. Finally, we can show a total share count as well as a network share count, where you can see how many times it’s been shared on each individual platform. Let’s go ahead and save changes. Now, I will point out if we go over to the configuration, we can also set a minimum share count. So that’ll actually hide those numbers until, let’s say, I don’t know, ten or twenty shares have happened and then it’ll start to show up.
It doesn’t look so sad with maybe one or two or three year zero shares. All right. We’ll come back and check out this configuration screen a little bit more in a second. But for now, let’s go ahead and check out this inline content widget that we just set up. Let’s go and check out some posts. I’ll go over to all posts and let’s open up this one right here. And sure enough, here, our share icons right above the post.
I could click on the print icon. It opens up the dialog. I could try to share it on Reddit. It’s going to connect me up to read it. I mean, resize the window here so you can see it. I can log in, share the content right away on Reddit. Maybe I want to post it over on Twitter. Here is what the Twitter share screen looks like. It fills in the headline of the Post as well as a link back to that post.
So everything is working right out of the box, as smooth as you’d expect. All right. Next, let’s go ahead and set up the floating bar. Let’s go to turn this on when we have this display on the pages. And why don’t we choose? Oh, I don’t know. Definitely Pinterest would be a good choice here. I’ll turn that on. And how about Yamli and the print screen? All right. We’ll leave everything else as is.
It’s going to be very similar to what we saw in the previous screen with a mobile breakpoint, the ability to change the button size and shape. Lets go ahead and maybe make this large and rounded just so we can get a feel for what things look like and we’ll leave all of the other options as is. We’ll go ahead and save changes. Let’s go ahead and check this out on the front end. There is our floating bar. Remember, this is the large size.
Maybe I’ll go and toggle through a few different options for you. It’s going to use small and circular and limited use a little bit more boring color for our buttons. So it doesn’t really pop out from the content. It’s great in it. Save changes here and visit the site. There we go. You see, this is a nice subdued look for the social icons. You could have this on your blog page or. Or something like that, or it’s not going to distract from the content that you want people to be reading.
All right. Now, the last option is called click to tweet. This is to add a click, the tweet button to your content. This is a little bit different than the other two options because you’re going to add it into your content, either via shortcode or using a Gutenberg block. The two options we have here are really three options is the styling, whether we want to use the themes, default, styling for things like buttons or if we want to override it with one of their different styles.
We have simple and simple alternative. The call to action text is the next option where we can say click the tweet. I think that text is going to be just fine for almost all of the cases because people know what that means. We want to be too creative here. And then the position for the call to action, whether you want it on the left or the right hand side, again, leave it in the default right hand side. All right.
Let’s go ahead and try this out on a post. All right. We’re over inside a post when I go ahead and open up this post we looked at earlier with the edit button. All right. So here is our post. Now, if you look at the formatting, it looks completely crazy because this was actually pulled in automatically from YouTube using the automatically generated text. So there’s no paragraph’s or, you know, punctuation here. This is definitely not a typical looking post.
But if I want to add a click to tweet button, I can easily do that. I’ll go ahead and add a new block in here. You can actually see the NOVA tweet click to tweet button right here. I’ll just click on that and then I can add in some text that I want tweeted along with this. I’ll say here is all the software you need to start a WordPress agency. This is another tweet. So this is the tweet that’s going to go along with the link to this page.
We can choose a theme by default. It’s going to use a blue background. I’ll go ahead and choose the simple, transparent background. These are the same options we just looked at over in the configuration screen so I can replace the call to action text on a case by case basis if I want to. I can also change the call to action position from the left to right. I’m going away and leave it on the right. If you want to remove the fuel from your post, maybe you’re just trying to raise awareness of your brand and you’re doing an attention to your brand, trying to get people to share it.
You could actually remove the user of the post by clicking this. I think most of the time you’re not going to click this, but it is there as an option. Next, we can remove the user name. So the Twitter username saved inside of Novashare will not be included in the tweet. And then finally, we can also hide hashtags so they’re not displaying on the box. All right. Let’s go ahead and insert this shortcode. All right.
There it is. That is the shortcode. If I wanted to use this inside of a page builder, I can certainly do that there as well. Let’s go ahead and check out what this looks like on the front end. All right. Let’s go all the way down to the bottom of the post. And here we go. This is the tweet right here. It says, Click to tweet. You know, in retrospect, I think I would like that more on the left hand side, because the width of this column makes it kind of hard to understand what this is.
But if I do click on this, it opens it up in Twitter and it has the tweet that I mentioned and even kind of shows you in this preview box. This is what the tweet will look like. So overall, that works really, really smoothly. And I could see it actually being useful, especially if you’re calling out, say, inspirational quotes or things in articles that are really, really interesting that people would want to share with our audience.
It’s a really nice way to do that here. Let’s try this again and just try some different options here so you can see what the plugin looks like in different circumstances. I’ll have that same tweet back in. Let’s go ahead and choose the gray background at this time. I’m going to move this over to the left hand side and I think everything else looks pretty good. We’re go to insert the shortcode hit update here on the post and let’s go and check it out on the front end.
We’ll scroll down to the bottom. And you know what? That click to tweet is still showing up on the right hand side, even though I added it to the left. Other than that, I think this looks much better with a gray background. It stands out more from the white background a little bit. But yeah, overall, I like this. I wish the click to tweet would show up on the left where I chose it, but maybe I’m doing some wrong.
All right. Just a few more features to cover here. If I’m inside of a page or post natural all the way down to the bottom, you’re going to see the Novashare details. This is where you can actually turn on and off different widgets inside on a post by post or page by page basis. You can see right here I can hide the inline content. If I didn’t want those links to show up at the top, I could do that.
I could also remove the floating bar. However, I don’t have the floating bar showing up on post. I only have a displaying on pages. So those are the options to do that. Now there’s also the ability to change the social media sharing information. They call this the open graph information so we can change the social media title here, the Pinterest title. We can have dedicated images for social media. So that’ll be things like Facebook and Twitter.
And then Pinterest also has its own type of image. Obviously, the images on Pinterest are of a different format. Right. So these are 800 by twelve hundred versus the twelve hundred by six thirty four the other platforms. And then we could also add in our social media description here. So a really nice way to make all of the posts that you share immediately look good when they’re shared on social media. Now take this from me. I do affiliate marketing and I share quite a bit of links on my Facebook group.
Right. So. Over to the Facebook group, if you’re not a member and you’ll see some of the affiliate links that I share, I would say throughout the course of a week there’s probably a good one third of the images that may be a little high, but probably not much SocialBee one third of the images that I share that have absolutely no social image at all. And they just look terrible. They get less engagement. They stand out a lot less than the posts that have a nice custom designed image that go along with the social sharing.
So this is worth your time? It really is. If you want people talking about you on social media. All right. I told you we’d come back to this configuration screen. I will say that’s kind of the bulk of the plugin. You’ve seen most of what it can do already. But let’s go ahead and get into some of the geeky details with the configuration screen. So we talked about the minimum share count a little bit earlier on. That’s to avoid showing share buttons before you actually have enough to be proud of.
That has been shared. Now, next is basically where you need to log in to things like Twitter and Facebook in order to accurately get that information into the plug in so that it can be displayed. So you will need to have a Twitter user name and a Facebook app ID, which means you need to you have a business account and set up the app. It’s it’s not that hard, but it’s really not that easy. Either the user interface or setting it up inside of Facebook definitely leaves a little bit to be desired.
So those are the options right here for logins. I should point out, you don’t need to log in to make anything work the way you’ve seen it work inside of this demo. It’s all out of the box, works without logging in. But if you want those share counts to show up, that’s where the login is important. We can choose the share refresh rate. You know how often it’s pulling in that information. By default, it is set to high.
There’s also the option to purge, share, count. So if you want to just start over, you can go ahead and click that button right there and it’ll delete any existing share accounts. Next up, we have Google Analytics and the ability to create UTM campaigns. So each link that gets shared from your website can actually have some attribution built into it using a UTM campaign. So do something like a social network. So let’s say Facebook is going to be the network that is sharing the medium would be social media.
So leaving that as social would be ideal. And then you can change the actual name. Let’s say you want to be blog post or something like that. You could go ahead and change that right here. Right now they are saying Novashare. So, you know, it’s coming actually from the Novashare buttons. It’s not a bad idea to just leave that as is. You can find out if anyone was actually using your sharing buttons. All right. Last but not least, we have a Bitly integration with link shortening.
You’re simply going to turn this on, add in your access token and you’ll be ready to go shortening your links with Bitly. So let’s it short and sweet. That’s what the plugin does. Ad social sharing to your website now. Yes, you can do this with Elementor Pro or basically whatever WP Gridbuilder you’re using, but I like using a plugin for this that’s changed actually over the last year. First I thought, why would I add another plug in when I can already do this with my page?
Bolar Have you done this with a WP Gridbuilder? It’s really not that intuitive. It’s hard to make things that look good. The the bubbles are always kind of getting wonky. They’re not displaying correctly on the front end as they are inside of the editor. So I’ve really struggled to make this look clean and simple. Yet either pop up, you’ll end up having multiple pop ups on one page. Yeah, it’s just kind of clunky right now in Elementor.
And if they improve that experience, I’ll probably switch back over to doing it in Elementor. But for now, I’m really preferring to have a standalone plugin. I click a few buttons and then automatically it looks good, very easy to toggle on and off inside of each post. I don’t have to go into Elementor choose the display conditions. So yeah, there is a good reason to have a plug in like this in your arsenal. If you’re not already using something like social warfare, this is a really decent option and they say it’s faster.
I don’t know how you really test whether it’s faster, you know, other than turning the both on and then running just metrics. But, you know, the amount of overhead that this plugin is adding is basically nothing. So if you wanna grab your copy of Novashare, of course, I’ll have a link in the description. That’ll be the referral link for this channel. If you pick it up, we will get a little bit of a commission, but it doesn’t cost you anything extra.
You have any questions about this plugin or anything else related to growing a profitable business? Make sure you leave me a comment down below. I do try to respond to everybody as quickly as possible, but you can also ask it over in the Facebook group where not only I will be answering, but all of the brilliant people who watch this channel and have subscribed to our Facebook group. It’s totally free head on over there and join the community of like minded entrepreneurs working on growing our businesses with the help of technology.
It’s going to do it for this video. I hope you’ve enjoyed watching. Thank you for checking out. And I’ll see you in the next one.
