Want to add social share buttons to your BuddyPress-powered community? Most people already spend a big chunk of their day on social media.
Social media is a genuinely good way to build engagement and pull new members into your community. The simplest route there is letting members share what they post with their own networks, and that starts with adding social sharing buttons to your BuddyPress site.
Adding Social Share Buttons to BuddyPress
Here’s exactly how to do it.
Why Add Social Share Buttons to BuddyPress?
Social networking remains one of the most popular things people do online. Per Statista, an estimated 2.65 billion people were using social media worldwide in 2018, a number projected to climb toward 3.1 billion by 2021.
That kind of reach makes social media a genuine growth lever for a business, and a direct way to put your community in front of potential new members.
Letting members share their favorite posts and updates to their own social accounts can make your BuddyPress community noticeably more visible, since it gets seen by their friends and followers elsewhere too.
Adding a social share button to your BuddyPress website can help you:
- Get more traffic to your community
- Grow your social media following
- Increase engagement on your website
- Build brand recognition and social proof
Here’s how to add social share options in BuddyPress.
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1. Adding Social Share Options in BuddyPress
We’ll use the BuddyPress Activity Social Share plugin for this, a dedicated, free BuddyPress add-on.
It adds a social share button directly to post updates on your BuddyPress site, and it’s built to stay lightweight so it won’t drag down site performance.
First, install and activate the BuddyPress Activity Social Share plugin. For the full walkthrough, see how to install BuddyPress Activity Share.
Once it’s installed, go to Dashboard > BP Social Share > General Settings.
General settings let you add any social service along with its Font Awesome icon class and description. A handful of services come included by default: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pocket, Reddit, and Pinterest.
Once added, you can select, deselect, or remove any of these services as you see fit.
The plugin also offers a couple of extra options, like opening the share window in a popup or using a member’s avatar as the Open Graph image. Add and select the services you want, then save your settings.
Frontend View
Once settings are saved, a share button appears in the post-update section of the Activity Feed.
Bottom Line
When a member clicks Share, they see a toggle listing every enabled service. Clicking a specific one opens that platform’s share popup.
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