Skip to main content
WordPress made easy with the drag & drop Total WordPress Theme!Learn More

Social Snap Pro WordPress Social Plugin Review

Last updated on:

Part of a successful WordPress site is social network interaction. Tons of plugins are meant to provide such functionality, be it for social sharing, social follow or using your favorite social network to easily integrate a login. This is particularly handy when a website needs social interaction in the comments or rapid sharing of articles.

The big problem with free social plugins is that it’s a trade off. Yes, they’re free. But they often either have very limited functionality or a subpar presentation. This is why choosing a premium plugin is often best, especially if you website is your business. Social Snap Pro is one premium option. The plugin is offered as a subscription service (paid per year) and offers a tight integration of all of great services in one easy to install plugin.

Social Snap Pro features social sharing, social follow buttons, social meta tags, click to tweet, an auto poster for easy publishing to your preferred networks automatically and social login. They also promise a very interesting feature – their own social locker to lock content until a user shares it.

Social Snap Pricing

Social Snap Pro comes in 3 variants. Plus is $39 a year, but without the add-ons and for just 1 site. Then we have the Pro, which is the version we are going to review. Pro can be used on up to 3 sites and includes all add-ons for $99 a year. Finally the Agency plan is $299 but offers up to 15 site installations. For developers or businesses with many sites this is your best bet.

Social Snap Pro is very useful as it comes with all the add-ons. However, this is why I think that the Plus subscription is a little too high on it’s price for social icons. The Plus version does also include analytics, social meta tags, share count recovery, and page view counters. But I think the Pro subscription it’s the best value of them all. Now let’s take a closer look at the add-ons before using the plugin.

Social Snap Add-ons

If you use the Pro version you’ll have access to all of the Social Snap premium add-ons. One available to use is Social Login. This handy add-on will let you use your preferred social network as a social login to your site. This means your readers won’t have to register on your site in order to post content – such as comments on blog articles.

The Boost Old Post add-on allows Social Snap to automatically post old articles to your preferred social networks. This can help increase visibility and traffic to your content. And the Auto poster add-on is useful in case you need to skip the manual sharing process (something that is very time consuming when you have tons of articles posted or updated each day).

As of today, Content Locker is still not available. I would love to had tried that kind of add-on as it is very useful because it forces some of your key articles to be shared in order to be read properly. I think this add-on alone is worth paying for if it’s included in the Pro subscription.

Social Snap content

Social Snap Features & Settings

Before testing the plugin we downloaded the main file and the add-ons. The main plugin window looks like this.

Social Snap Features

There are tons of options available. While it reminds me of the old Monarch plugin from Elegant Themes, the amount of content and options here is astonishing. And the final presentation far superior to alternatives.

Social Share

Social Snap Social Share

On of the first options to enable is social sharing. This is done using the Social Sharing tab where you can include your preferred social networks before configuring share buttons. The plugin allows for different locations/styles such as a floating sidebar, inline buttons, inside media, share hub or a sticky bar.

Social Snap Configuring

Configuring the networks is super fast and easy. Everything worked just fine and in no time. Another option you can enable from here is the share count provider for Twitter.

Social Snap Networks

Social Snap Pro allows for all the social networks you could imagine, at least all of the major ones.

Once your networks are configured you can opt for several locations and kind of displays from the previous menu. As you can see the presentation is rock solid.

Social Snap Share

The Share via type of icons adapts very easily on all screen sizes without having to tweak them (as it happens with some free plugins). Just configure the block type – be it rounded, circle, rectangle or slanted as well as the button size. You can also tweak the message label.

The inline buttons on the media look simply stunning and can be easily tweaked in no time. The quality of the plugin is easily seen on the amount of options, functionality and easily configurable setting. Put simply, the plugin just works.

The Share Hub allows you to have one bottom button which opens up into a “hub”. You can configure its location on pages, display all network buttons, change the appearance, enable tooltips and enable/disable view count. This makes for a very customized share hub.

The sticky bar is one of the best formats as it will “fit” your current screen and looks amazing. Now let’s see how the social follow look.

Social Follow

Social follow allows you to introduce floating buttons to display how many people follow your site. Usually you might see these on the main or home page of a website. They give a general status of the social clout of a site on all the social networks they use.

Social Snap Social Follow

Adding each social network link is not that easy as with the social share. For social follow you do need to provide username and password for your usual networks in order for Social Snap to get your followers. It’s not a complicated process though – just takes a minute.

Social Snap Pro includes custom functions too. You can configure the amount of columns to use, change the layout of social follow, or even include the click to tweet with the follow username and manage the social metadata.

Advanced Options

Social Snap also has Analytics Tracking that you easily access via the dashboard, as well as link shortening. It even has GDPR compliance measures built-in.

On the Plugin Data page we can remove the Powered By message, hide the plugin announcements and updates and remove the related data for plugin detection. This turns Social Snap into a “blank” plugin that will not reveal any details about it to anyone outside of your WordPress dashboard, neat!

Once you have everything in place, the plugin allows you to export the settings to be imported in a later date or on other websites. This enables easy deployment of the plugin on your sites. Now that you’ve seen the core plugin features, let’s look at the Pro add-ons.

Social Login

The first add-on I’m going to show you is the Social Login. Although there are free social login plugins, what’s cool about this one is that it retains the same presentation and inner workings as the Social Snap main plugin. This makes the whole process seamless and with proper aesthetics. For fans of a unified aesthetic, this is a must. Here at WPExplorer we’re also big fans of installing one plugin for each purpose – so having a single plugin to manage all of your social media needs is a must.

The Social Login add-on does require you to configure an API ID and secret. Once setup, whenever a new reader comes to your site Social Snap will display the easy Login with button for each network you’ve added. This allows that social network to get your login data and pass it onto the website for easy registering. Once you create any necessary social networks apps (for example, here is Facebook’s guide), configuring the AppID, Secret and redirect URI is generally all it takes in order for this to function properly. Just remember to keep your Developer’s App enabled at all times inside your social network.

The social login buttons works as advertised and add a new layer of interaction to your site. Because of them, readers can share articles and easily comment without having to create a new account.

Social Auto Poster

The Auto Poster is a neat plugin that allows you to auto share your articles. This add-on also requires API access, so the previous steps involved when setting up Social Login are also useful for enabling this functionality. To make the process easier you can actually use the same API key and secret.

Social Snap Auto Poster

The auto posting works but the only drawback I ran into was that it only allows you to auto-post on Twitter and Linkedin. No auto-posting on Facebook could be a problem for some and the plugin would benefit from adding Facebook to the list.

Social Statistics

Once everything is configured and in place, we can monitor the statistics of all our posts on the Social Snap Statistics page.

Social Snap Social Statistics

The plugin displays total shares, total click to tweets and total likes as well as a chart for top performing posts. This is particularly useful if you want to know what people liked the most from your content. This information can be used to improve your content, understand your readers better and optimize your social media marketing campaigns.

Social Snap Frontend

Now let’s see how Social Snap looks. For this I’ve installed Divi with a predefined template.

Social Snap Left Sidebar

Above is an example of how the left sidebar social network icons look on a homepage.

Social Snap Rounded Sharing

And an example of some of Social Snap’s nice rounded sharing buttons displayed on a post.

Social Snap Backend Editor

Now let’s see what Social Snap looks like on the backend. How you and/or your authors might see it.

Social Snap Pro

Social Snap Pro follows the same presentation on the configuration tab and shows content options on the bottom of each post. The plugin also allows for easy disabling of share buttons on a per post basis.

Plus enabling Gutenberg does not affect Social Snap, which is great to know! In fact, the plugin includes a Gutenberg ready blocks that make it easy to insert a Click to Tweet, Social Share or Social Follow element on your posts and pages.

Social Snap Gutenberg Blocks

When inserting a new Gutenberg block simply search for “Social Snap” to insert the social option of your choosing. Then use the built-in styling options to customize your social block.

Final Thoughts on Social Snap

Let’s see how this wraps up. Social Snap Pro has a lot of good stuff going on. For starters it provides a very slick and clean interface, perfect looking buttons, tons of customizations available to the end user and the possibility to include add-ons (which, among other things includes the famous social login and auto-posting). Everything worked as advertised and the plugin has one of the best presentations i’ve seen for social sharing buttons. The social login add-on is one of the best features the plugin has to offer in my opinion. This in combination with social share and social follow turns Social Snap into an awesome package. The social auto-posting add-on could definitely include more networks (because as it is, it seems very limited) but it’s still useful.

The inclusion of the social locker could definitely turn this package into an all around winner. But without it or other available add-ons, the basic package likely isn’t attractive enough for the majority of users. Social Snap needs to build more add-ons for Pro users, and either include at least 1 add-on or reduce the price of the Plus subscription to be more competitive with free plugins (even their own free version of Social Snap). I think if Social Snap did improve add-ons, specifically the auto-poster, then it could easily compete with SNAP Pro from NextScripts (a long time top auto-posting plugin).

In my opinion Social Snap is targeted at websites that require the absolute best presentation, consistent social network services that works (without depending on a free integration or plugin) and of course, good statistics. Social Snap has all of that. But the price of the Pro subscription and the need for that subscription in order to get access to all add-ons may dissuade some. If Social Snap could launch more add-ons or reduce the price this would be an absolute winner. As it is now, presentation and functionality alone, Social Snap has no match. If you are willing and able to invest in your business then go and get it. You won’t find any other plugin for WordPress with comparable functionality and the same clever, clean and sleek design.

Subscribe to the Newsletter

Get our latest news, tutorials, guides, tips & deals delivered to your inbox.

6 Comments

  1. Arron

    Hi Alex, great article on the social snap. Does Social Snap support floating buttons feature? because it is a great feature to get good social shares. although social snap sounds great social plugin, pretty much interested in trying it.

    Regards
    Arron

    • Kyla

      Yes! Social Snap Pro includes options for floating sidebar, inline, on media, sticky bar, share hub as well as widget and shortcode options for your social sharing buttons.

  2. Harpreet Kumar

    Social Snap is a great plugin and a Good alternative to Social Warfare plugin.

    The plugin is quite responsive and comes with a lots of features and customization options.

    Thanks for sharing these detailed review

  3. Waqas Mushtaq

    Social Snap is a very nice plugin and very easy to customize. I use this plugin on many of my websites.

    Thanks for sharing it in your article!

  4. Dan

    The content locker has been “coming soon” for more than a year so I would 100% not factor this into anyone’s decision process. It’s just vapourware.

    • Kyla

      That’s a bummer! Thanks for letting us know – we’ll try to reach out and see where they’re at in the process 🙂

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Learn how your comment data is processed by viewing our privacy policy here.