Social Media Share Buttons – Socialized

Description

Socialized adds social media sharing buttons to your posts, pages, and custom post types that are automatically integrated with Google Analytics using campaign parameters. When a user shares your post using these buttons, they can share a vanity URL that is either automatically generated or customized by you and is specific to that button. When another user on social media then clicks on that shared link, the vanity URL redirects them to your page with analytics tracking automatically.

By adding campaign parameters to the destination URLs, you can collect information about the overall efficacy of these campaigns, and also understand where the campaigns are more effective. For example, your “Summer Sale” campaign might be generating lots of revenue, but if you’re running the campaign on several social media platforms, you’ll want to know which of them is sending you the customers who generate the most revenue. Or if you’re running different versions of the campaign via email, video ads, and in-app ads, you can compare the results to see where your marketing is most effective.

The campaign parameters that are automatically added are sent to Google Analytics when a user clicks on one of the shared links, and the related data is available in the campaigns reports. Below is a list of the campaign parameters that are added and their possible values:

• utm_id – value: socialized
• utm_source – possible value(s): facebook | twitter | linkedin | bluesky | pinterest | email | vanity-url
• utm_medium – possible value(s): social | email | vanity-url
• utm_content – possible value(s): socialized-share-link
• utm_campaign – value: socialized | or define in Settings
• utm_term – value: Defined by typing in the text field in the metabox on the post or page | or the “Focus keyphrase” by Yoast SEO
• utm_creative_format – value: user-share-link
• utm_marketing_tactic – value: prospecting

Shortened URLs

This plugin can automatically shorten your URLs without using any external URL shortener services or APIs! This makes it so your website’s domain is still the one being shared. You can also customize your short URLs.

Your permalink struture will not be affected. The randomly generated vanity URLs are automatically created when you save the post. Learn more about custom campaigns in Google.

Analytics Ready

When users click on your shortened URLs that get shared out in the wild, they automatically have customized parameters assigned. Google Analytics 4 automatically picks up on the UTM parameters but other analytics platforms like Piwik, Matomo, and any other home-grown platform!

Performance Friendly

All images have been optimized, minified JS and CSS, and you can choose to disable FontAwesome if your site is already loading it. JavaScript loads in the footer either asynchronously or with deferred loading to prevent impacting your site’s performance score.

Simple HTML & CSS

If you want to customize the look and feel, the HTML and CSS are very simple so that they can be easily overridden by you.

Screenshots

Installation

There are three (3) ways to install my plugin: automatically, upload, or manually.

Install Method 1: Automatic Installation

Automatic installation is the easiest option as WordPress handles the file transfers itself and you don’t need to leave your web browser.

1. Log in to your WordPress dashboard.
2. Navigate to Plugins > Add New.
3. Where it says “Keyword” in a dropdown, change it to “Author”
4. In the search form, type TessaWatkinsLLC (results may begin populating as you type but my plugins will only show when the full name is there)
5. Once you’ve found my plugin in the search results that appear, click the Install Now button and wait for the installation process to complete.
6. Once the installation process is completed, click the Activate button to activate my plugin.
7. After this plugin is activated, see below for additional instructions for setup.

Install Method 2: Upload via WordPress Admin

This method is a little more involved. You don’t need to leave your web browser, but you’ll need to download and then upload the files yourself.

1. Download my plugin from www.ads-software.com; it will be in the form of a zip file.
2. Log in to your WordPress dashboard.
3. Navigate to Plugins > Add New.
4. Click the Upload Plugin button at the top of the screen.
5. Select the zip file from your local file system that was downloaded in step 1.
6. Click the Install Now button and wait for the installation process to complete.
7. Once the installation process is completed, click the Activate button to activate it.
8. After this plugin is activated, see below for additional instructions for setup.

Install Method 3: Manual Installation

This method is the most involved as it requires you to be familiar with the process of transferring files using an SFTP client.

1. Download my plugin from www.ads-software.com; it will be in the form of a zip file.
2. Unzip the contents; you should have a single folder named socialized.
3. Connect to your WordPress server with your favorite SFTP client.
4. Copy the folder from step 2 to the /wp-content/plugins/ folder in your WordPress directory. Once the folder and all of its files are there, installation is complete.
5. Now log in to your WordPress dashboard.
6. Navigate to Plugins > Installed Plugins. You should now see my plugin in your list.
7. Click the Activate button under my plugin to activate it.
8. After this plugin is installed and activated, see below for additional instructions for setup.

After Plugin Activation

1. Navigate to Tools > Socialized to change any global settings to fit your needs.
2. When creating new posts or editing existing ones, use the meta box to configure settings specific to that post.
3. Publish your post to see the buttons on the page.

FAQ

What platforms are supported?

Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), LinkedIn, Bluesky, Pinterest, email, and copying to clipboard (for sites with SSL enabled) are supported.

Can I change the name of the campaign?

Yes! You can change the name of the campaign, or the value of utm_campaign, from the plugin settings page.

Can I change the vanity URL?

Yes! When a new post is created, a random string will be generated for that post, but you can edit it to be whatever you want. However, it will be suffixed with a dash and a character to recognize the platform and map it to the correct campaign parameters.

Does this affect my page’s URL, permalink, or canonical URL?

No. This won’t have any effect on your page’s URL, permalink, permalink settings, or canonical URL. The vanity URL is simply another way of getting to your page but with the added Google campaign parameters automatically added. This plugin does not create any new pages, only redirects, so there won’t be any duplicate content issues.

Does this affect my page’s SEO or “page rank”?

It will not harm your page’s SEO. Since the vanity URLs redirect using 301 permanent redirects, the “page rank” is transferred to your original page, preserving your SEO value.

Does this affect my domain authority?

Yes, but in a good way! Using a URL shortener service like bit.ly or TinyURL gets a miniscule amount of “domain authority” when pages are redirected through their domains since it is ultimately their URL that gets shared on other websites. You actually gain this bonus back when it is your domain that gets shared instead.

How does it choose an image to share on Pinterest?

If there is an image in the content of your article, it will find the first one and use that. Otherwise, it will fall back to using the featured image. If no image is associated with the article, then Pinterest will display all of the images found on the page, allowing the user to select which they want to use.

What icons do you have?

You can choose between lossless PNG images, Font Awesome icons, or text. The HTML is simple so you can easily change the appearance with CSS.

Is this compatible with the Yoast SEO plugin?

Yes! If you leave the “Campaign Term” blank in the metabox on your page, the utm_term value will default to your page’s “focus keyphrase” in Yoast SEO’s metabox.

Reviews

Contributors & Developers

Changelog

4.1.0

Release Date: March 5, 2025

• Updated FontAwesome assets to version 6.7.1
• Added Bluesky sharing button
• Fixed a bug for Pinterest sharing that would sometimes try to send the text “No image available” instead of an empty string.

4.0.0

Release Date: September 27, 2023

• Updated FontAwesome assets to version 6.4.2
• Updated Twitter icon to X
• Updated backend admin logo and UI to match other AuRise Creative plugins
• Overhauled plugin code to be more consistent with other AuRise Creative plugins
• Values for the checkbox/switch plugin options are now stored as 1 or 0 instead of the strings true and false. DB will update automatically when updating to this version or later.
• Option to individually show or hide the different platforms are now available in the settings
• Filter added to get_the_excerpt to remove the text generated by Socialized from appearing
• Using aria-hidden attribute on the “Copied!” tooltip for the vanity URL to improve accessibility
• added utm_id paramter with the value of socialized to all redirecting URLs for Google Analytics 4
• added utm_creative_format paramter with the value of user-share-link to all redirecting URLs for Google Analytics 4
• added utm_marketing_tactic parameter with the value of prospecting to all redirecting URLs for Google Analytics 4
• Displays the query in the backend
• Removed /languages folder in plugin to use WordPress Translate instead

3.0.4

Release Date: July 21, 2023

• Update: marked the plugin ready for WordPress core version 6.3
• Update: updated the wp_register_script() and wp_enqueue_script() functions to load assets with async and defer attributes

3.0.3

Release Date: October 27, 2022

• Fix: Added the nofollow value to the rel attribute for frontend sharing links to help reduce unnecessary crawling by search engines.

3.0.2

Release Date: September 26, 2022

• Fix: Fixed a fatal error that “DOMDocument” was not found.

Older Releases

Please see our additional changelog.txt file