Share buttons and social icons
Sharing buttons and social icons are a prominent strand of this category, reflected in both plugin names and related tags.
- AddToAny Share Buttons and Social Media Share Buttons & Social Sharing Icons are among the most installed options in the category.
- Simple Social Icons and Social Media Feather are other icon-focused names among the leading plugins.
- Related tags include share-buttons (40 plugins), share (35), social-share (34), social-sharing (30) and social-icons (22).
Social feeds, widgets and post automation
Other plugin names point to feeds, widgets and social-post automation alongside the sharing and icon focus.
SocialFeeds, Astra Widgets and Social Media Widget represent feed- and widget-labelled options; Buttonizer and NextScripts: Social Networks Auto-Poster broaden the set of names. These names describe the range of plugin types represented, without establishing specific capabilities.
Related tags show connections across networks and use cases: facebook appears on 56 category plugins, social on 46, twitter on 42 and instagram on 35. The auto-post tag appears on 22.
Ratings and update recency across popular plugins
Ratings range from excellent to mixed, while most listed plugins have recent update dates and two stand out for older updates.
- AddToAny Share Buttons: excellent, many reviews; updated 5 months ago.
- Astra Widgets: mixed, few reviews; updated 2 months ago.
- Social Media Share Buttons & Social Sharing Icons: excellent, many reviews; updated 1 month ago.
- Simple Social Icons: good, a moderate number of reviews; updated 1 month ago.
- SocialFeeds: excellent, few reviews; updated 1 month ago. Buttonizer: excellent, a moderate number of reviews; updated 2 months ago.
- Social Media Widget: mixed, a moderate number of reviews; updated 29 months ago. Hubbub Lite: excellent, a moderate number of reviews; updated 1 month ago.
- OG: excellent, a moderate number of reviews; updated this month. NextScripts: Social Networks Auto-Poster: mixed, many reviews; updated 2 months ago.
- Lightweight Social Icons: excellent, a moderate number of reviews; updated 80 months ago. Social Media Feather: excellent, many reviews; updated this month.
A broad category with limited large-scale adoption and uneven maintenance
The category contains many plugins, but relatively few reach high install counts, and update recency is uneven.
There are 329 plugins in Social Media, with four at 100,000 or more active installs and 17 at 10,000 or more. That spread suggests large-scale adoption is concentrated in a small portion of the category.
Just 48% were updated in the last year. When comparing options, readers can weigh install scale alongside ratings and review counts, while also checking update history rather than assuming that popularity alone signals recent maintenance.