How to Display Social Media Icons with Counts in WordPress

Have you ever been wondering how to display social media icons with count in WordPress? Recently, one of my clients messaged me and wanted to have such icons being displayed on his site. I was thinking if he doesn’t know how to, maybe not a lot of people know this, so might as well write an article about it. In this article, I will go step by step on how to implement social media icons with counts in WordPress.

First, login to your WordPress dashboard, and then go to Plugins -> add new; search for “Social Count Plus”, after you have found it, click install and activate it.

After that, you need to to setup the plugin; go to Setting ->Social Count Plus. On that page, you will see a list of social media sites: Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Google+, Instagram, etc. And when you check the box “ Activate/Deactivate”, the social media setting boxes will appear. Most of them are pretty straight forward and easy to setup. The only complex one is twitter, you will need API and Token codes, but there are instruction under each box on how to obtain them. 

For Twitter, you basically can go to dev.twitter.com/apps; first login to your twitter account, and then click “My Applications” on the top right of drop down menu. After that, you should see the “Create New App” button.  Next, following the instruction, and fill out all the fields. After everything is filled out and the agreement box is check, you can then click on the “Create Your Twitter Application” button.

After few seconds, you should be redirected to your newly created apps page. On that page, you will see API key tab, click on that, you will see API key and API secret, copy those and then go back to your WordPress site, and paste those into the fields.

Now in order to obtain other information, you will need to scroll down, and then click on the “Generate my access token” button; after page is reloaded, you will have all the information that is needed to fill out the rest of the fields. If you want to make sure they work, you can simply click on the “Test oAuthor” button on the twitter apps page.

For Google+,Instagram, facebook and the rest of the social media, they are pretty much the same and pretty easy to get the require information for all fields.

After you have check the needed social media sites for your WordPress site and filled out all the required fields, you can then go to Appearance -> widgets, and drag Social Count Plus widget to your sidebar.

Social count plus also comes with shortcodes that you can use on post/page or directly into theme. To get shortcodes, you can go to Setting -> Social Count Plus, and then click on the “Shortcodes and Functions” tab. There you will find all shortcodes and php codes.

In summary, I hope this article is helpful to anyone who want to display social media icons with count on his/her WordPress site. Leave a comment if you think the article is helpful or if you have any other alternatives.

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