Why Monarch is One of the Most Promising Social Plugins Ever Built

Today, nearly everyone from first- and second-world countries lives and breathes social networking. So it hardly comes as a surprise that, in what can now be described as the Internet Era, an overwhelming majority of people relish in sharing information on all sorts of online venues. Sharing everything on social media, from personal impressions to articles we read on one website or another, is just another way of expressing our identities - much like the clothes we wear, the things we say, and the manner in which we choose to spend our leisure time.

On the flip side, those articles, images, and videos we distribute so casually among ourselves always benefit their source of origin immeasurably. In other words, the further word travels about a certain website, the larger the traffic it generates. In this sense, social media shares actually rank as second-best to the traffic that translates from search engine queries.

If you come to think of it, this presents site creators, and especially site owners, with a huge opportunity. They are bound to ensure additional incoming traffic from social media websites, by using a proficient plugin. However, nothing worth doing is easy. In fact, the secret to drawing in armies of visitors lies in how well the social media plugin is integrated within a website.

What makes a social sharing plugin perfect

The ideal social sharing plugin would have to encourage visitors to spread the word to family, friends, and colleagues in their social circles, without being intrusive. So, first and foremost, its design must be flawless, not to mention responsive. Another crucial detail is that the social media plugin ought to be accompanied by an advanced dashboard, and come with the added benefits of automatic capabilities, like pop-ups and fly-ins.

The last generation of social plugins: Monarch

I suggest we turn our attention to a social plugin that meets all the necessary criteria, which I mentioned above. Monarch is a recently emerged plugin for WordPress websites, and we can study it to see what you might stand to gain by gracing your websites with a fine social media plugin by today's standards.

Powerful features

Monarch is the type of plugin that people actually have fun toying around with. It's uncomplicated, and at the same time has loads of powerful features. Example: an extended set of display variants, such as floating sidebars, inline buttons, and automatic pop-ups, which promise to pave the way for your visitors to share interesting website content.

We should start from the beginning. In other words, let's have a look at the Monarch Dashboard as a whole. It's the place you go to configure, administer, and monitor your social sharing and following. Monarch keeps it simple, and allows you to setup social networks, design buttons, as well as track your social statistics, and not only. You can easily access its custom designed interface through the WordPress Admin Panel.

A total number of 40 social networks are so far available with Monarch, so the public can easily share or follow your content everywhere, socially. I assume we all agree on the importance of following through with how well our websites' social sharing buttons are faring. I was glad to see that Monarch is on the same page as the rest of us, as it built in a great way to measure the so-called ‘user engagement' on a given site, as time goes by.

Users are free to manually input social follow counts, or connect their websites to their network API's to pull a dynamic follow count, and so make sure to keep track of follow stats in real time.

Let's veer towards the subject of design for a second. This is an important aspect in the eyes of every respectable professional, after all. Monarch users get plenty of design tools meant for customizing social buttons' overall apparel, so I guess I'm impressed with the way that its creators solved the problem of combining predefined network colors and icons. Furthermore, each and every website visitor will really be tempted to share/follow, because these social media buttons get along famously with all devices. Also, they look particularly crisp on Retina displays.

Customize your users' social experience

Moving further, Monarch users may customize the social experience associated with their websites, however they see fit. For the record, there are eight sharing and following locations to pick from. But let's see what else is Monarch capable of. I noticed that it seems to be optimized for fast loading, because it caches all the follow and share counts for this purpose, and lets you decide how often they should be updated.

You could always opt for timed delay of your pop-ups or fly-ins, which would serve to activate them after a certain amount of time has elapsed during your visitors' presence on the website. I, for instance, would try to time them with the mouse hover over the browser's back button. Good choice of timing, don't you think?

Some other golden features are included with the Monarch plugin. You can, for example, arrange certain network buttons (and their adjacent share counts) in a social floating sidebar, so your readers can access them without having to scroll up- or downwards.

On the other hand, Monarch is also stacked with precious automatic functionality, like detecting the exact limits of your posts and placing the buttons at either edge. Or, the delectable auto-detection of images in your website content, and how Monarch generates custom shortcodes that enable visitors to share those images further.

Check out this short video that explains Monarch in very comprehensive terms:

Conclusion

That's a wrap! I cannot emphasize the importance of proper social media plugins enough. As I already mentioned, they carry considerable weight. Using a sophisticated plugin for sharing on social networks can really work wonders for the incoming traffic of any website, and we all know that huge traffic also means a higher visitor-to-client conversion rate. Therefore, anyone, from freelance practitioners, to companies should turn to astute WordPress plugins, like Monarch from Elegant Themes.