6 Great Plugins for Adding a Social Stream to Your Blog

6 Great Plugins for Adding a Social Stream to Your Blog

Are you looking for an easy way to share your social networking updates with your blog readers and visitors? Since most of us are members of various social networking sites, a social stream is one of the best ways to show off all of your updates and shared content in an organized manner.

A social stream, often referred to as a lifestream, is a single stream of posts and updates from various social networks. It displays your status updates along with items that you’ve shared like links, images, and videos. Some social streams even display your social interactions with others that you’re connected to.

Today I’m going to share 6 WordPress plugins that can provide you with a social stream on your WordPress blog. Some of these plugins come in the form of a sidebar widget, while others give you a shortcode to use on a post or page of your blog.

Let’s take a look at them.

Feed Them Social

Feed Them Social lets you create three different types of social feeds: Instagram, Facebook Group, and Twitter. In the settings, you’ll need to generate shortcodes for the feeds that you want to use. You can then add those shortcodes to any page or post on your blog; you can use as many shortcodes as you want on that post or page.

Feed Them Social WordPress PluginSo if you wanted to display your Facebook and Twitter feeds on a page called “Social Stream,” you’d generate the two shortcodes and then add them both to the one page. Feed Them Social is really easy to set up and the feeds are really simple – not much formatting. It’s great for anyone that is looking for just a basic social stream for their blog.

Social Media Mashup

Social Media Mashup is a widget that you can add to your blog’s sidebar. It supports Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Flickr, YouTube and custom RSS feeds. Just choose your preferred sources and Social Media Mahsup will combine them into a single social stream, and display them on your blog.

Social Media Mashup WordPress Plugin

In the plugin’s settings you can also choose which set of feed icons to use in your social stream; there are three different styles to choose from.

RebelMouse

RebelMouse is another widget, much like Social Media Mashup. However, it goes a step further and gives you the option to turn any post or page into a social stream. So you can either use the included widget, or you can use a shortcode on one of your posts or pages. Your visitors will even be able to share your posts on Facebook and/or Twitter – right from your blog.

RebelMouse WordPress Plugin
RebelMouse in use on the Ian Roth Studio home page.

Lastly, you can also change your blog’s home page so that it displays your RebelMouse stream. Not only is this a great way to change up the look of your blog, but it makes your blog a lot more social. In order to use RebelMouse on your blog, you’ll need to sign up for a free account on their website. RebelMouse supports Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Instagram, Pinterest, and Tumblr.

WordPress Social Stream

WordPress Social Stream is a beautiful, premium plugin that supports 15 social networks and includes 60 feed options. It gives you a single stream for all of your social network updates, and can display them in two different formats: a rotating feed or network wall. Much like RebelMouse, your visitors will be able to share your posts on Facebook and/or Twitter (from your blog).

WordPress Social Stream Plugin

With Twitter posts, visitors also have the option to reply, retweet, and favorite your tweets. Your visitors can even filter your social stream by social network. There are many options included with this plugin, so that you can customize your stream and make it unique to your blog. WordPress Social Stream definitely stands out among the rest of the social stream plugins, and it’s just $14 for a regular license.

Lifestream

The Lifestream plugin can display your social networking updates, shared photos, and shared videos on any post or page; it supports over 50 different sources like Twitter, YouTube, Delicious, and RSS feeds. It stores your entire feed history, not just a week or two.

LIfestream WordPress Plugin

You can also change up the style using custom CSS stylesheets, which is nice because the default look is a bit plain. If you want to extend Lifestream even more, be sure to check out the plugins page on their website. The Lifestream plugin is very similar to Social Timeline, another WordPress plugin that displays your updates from various social networks.

WordPress Social Timeline

Finally, we have WordPress Social Timeline, another premium plugin for creating a stylish social stream in a timeline format. WordPress Social Timeline includes a widget, but you can also add it to any post or page on your blog. You can pull in posts, images, and videos from social networks like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Pinterest, and Vimeo.

WordPress Social Timeline WordPress Plugin

There are different styles to choose from and you can also choose to display the icons for each social network, right in your stream. Although users can’t share your posts, there is a permalink for each post so that they can go to the original source and interact with it from there. Visitors can filter sort your posts by social network and even change the layout (if you enable it in settings).

What Do You Use?

Do you have a social stream or lifestream on your blog? If so, do you have an entire post or page dedicated for your social stream, or are you just using a widget? Which plugin are you using?

Creative Commons image courtesy of SteveD

Disclaimer: All opinions and recommended plugins in this post are solely mine, and not those of anyone else at ManageWP.

Charnita Fance

Charnita is a part-time freelance writer and blogger, and the owner of Social Web Tools. As an early adopter, she enjoys trying out new social media and Internet tools along with WordPress plugins and Web apps. You can find her at various social networks such as Facebook, Twitter and Google+

45 Comments

  1. Francis

    Hey guys!
    I’d like to recommend you the social media plugin I’m using for my website now. It’s easy to use and helps me to make my page more popular and more social. Check it out here if you wish: https://wordpress.org/plugins/social-media-builder/

  2. Jasa Pembuatan Website

    your blog comment form so beauty, what plugin used to make this?

  3. Bryan

    Feed Them Social plugin works perfectly on my site.

  4. INDIHOME

    How many plugin that i can install on one site ?
    because my site already install all plugin that you suggested but my site look like get heavier while loading .

  5. Adnan

    Finally i found this. I will try this on my website. Thanks for your useful information.

  6. cara membersihkan ram laptop

    wow , nice for the plugin on our website , I we are still using blogspot

  7. jasa pembuatan toko online

    thank you sir
    for information about the type of plugins that are useful to our website

  8. Jasa Pembuatan Website

    this really awesome, i wanna to try this at my private blog, because social stream can see our blog is alive everyday

  9. Jasa pembuatan website di jakarta

    i thing you have to add this plugin to my site, a debt of gratitude is in order for sharing

  10. Andrew

    Hi Charnita,

    first of all, congrats for your collection, but have you tried CardZ?

    http://codecanyon.net/item/cardz-social-stream-for-wordpress/11847053

    Comparing with other plugins, with CardZ you have the possibility to add custom banners/ads in your stream, to measure traffic for your posts (Analytics Module Inside) and control the content from anywhere.

    It is also Visual Composer Ready and works with any theme. If you have any ideas how to improve this plugin or you need any other features, let us a comment.

    Thank you,
    Andrew

  11. Jasa Pembuatan Website Bandung

    last week , instagram update their website , and my site cant embed link directly , this just me or ?

  12. Jasa Pembuatan Website Jakarta

    i thing you need to add this plugin to my website, thanks for sharing

  13. paket internet

    If I’m searching for information and happen to see their latest tweets in the sidebar or something, I’ll check them out.

  14. samira

    WordPress Social Board is the best choice for those who are looking for an easy way to combine all of their social networking activities into one single social stream and display on their website.
    With this plugin you can create a single combined social media stream including all of your social networks accounts with multiple social network profiles, and can display them in 6 different formats.
    http://codecanyon.net/item/wordpress-social-board/10458271

    1. Mojtaba

      It looks awesome. It has everything in one package.

  15. jasa pembuatan website surabaya

    well, thank you for your list.
    it will make me easy to choose than going to wordpress directly.
    once again, thank you

  16. Piper

    Thanks for the list! I would recommend Visitlead Live Chat. It’s a great way of communicating with your visitors. https://visitlead.com/plugins/livechat-tumblr/

  17. Steve

    Social Streams for WordPress is the first premium plugin built for WordPress first! It’s fully responsive, photo driven and allows you to aggregate your own feed or public searches based on hashtags, @mentions and keywords.

    It’s free for the time being.. Definitely recommend checking it out! socialstreams.com

  18. Harrison Bay

    Another plugin which stores social media posts directly inside the blog is Aggregate. Currently it supports Twitter hashtags feed, Instagram hashtag feeds and RSS feeds. Theres more about it at http://aggregateplugin.com

  19. Nicole

    I love what Knotlink have done. They have this for users and more “Channels” coming and be able to put it all in one stream.

  20. Robin Jenings

    I’ve used WordPress social stream for some Art festivals I’ve designed websites for and it really lifts the profile of the website and festival especially when the festival is on.

  21. Stem Cell Malaysia

    All the above are commercial plugins. Do you know Open source alternative? I want to extend for my website.

  22. jasa pembuatan web

    is there any plugin that can post (status update) from wordpress frontend ? I want discussion like page 🙂

  23. SuzuKube

    I don’t really use social media, just the publicize option in JetPack 😉

  24. Trinacle

    I am looking for a solution for Social Timeline, has anyone checked out the CodeCayon plugin? WordPress Social Timeline

  25. Wallflux.com

    You forgot about Wallflux.com!
    With Wallflux you can import Facebook groups and pages into your WP blog’s sidebar, or for example, by using the feedwordpress-plugin, facebook posts as blog posts.

  26. Angel Rodriguez

    Well, you know, I wasn’t even looking for this exactly, but that social stream is pretty awesome and I may have to partake of that for my website! Thank you kindly for sharing these tools. Serendipity? 🙂

  27. Michael W. Lind

    Thanks for this article, Charnita! WordPress Social Stream was just what I was looking for.

  28. Tasha Mitchell

    Thanks for the article. Rebel Mouse does not support Tumblr. Can you recommend a plugin that does and does it well?

    1. Tasha Mitchell

      Oh wait, Rebel Mouse does support Tumblr on the back end. It would be nice if they made that clearer.

  29. Fran

    I couldn’t get the social media mashup to work, and the last time anyone even posted anything in their support forum was 2011. I was able to get the FBF Facebook Page Widget to work, however there are 2 tricks I wish you had mentioned:
    1. You need your page Id, NOT your vanity URL. To find that you have to right-click on a photo and pull out the part of the address between . and &type
    2. Your page has to be visible to the public, that means it must have no age restriction and no country restriction set.

    Once I figured those 2 things out the FBF plugin worked fine, but the Mashup did not.

  30. Kumar Gauraw

    I still wonder if people look at them. However, these may be a “good to have” options. Anyways, I like your floating sharing bar and I wonder if you have used Digg Digg?

    1. Charnita Fance

      Author

      Hi Kumar,

      I’ve tried Digg Digg on my personal blog and I wasn’t too fond of it. I’m not sure what is being used here on ManageWP. Maybe @tomewer can help you with that.

      ~Charnita

  31. Piet

    what I don’t understand is why the author of this article is recommending plugins that have not been updated for more than a year?!

    1. Charnita Fance

      Author

      Some people (including myself), don’t mind using plugins that haven’t been updated in awhile – as long as they still function properly. Some of my favorite plugins are older, yet provide a very useful feature. Sorry for the inconvenience, if that bothers you.

      1. Piet

        Thanks for your reply.

        Personal preference is one thing.

        Recommending it for public use under the ManageWP name is entirely different!

        The least ManageWP should do imho, is add a disclaimer that in this article you solely express your opinion.

        1. Charnita Fance

          Author

          Yes, it is my opinion and my name is listed as the author. Just like posts by other authors on ManageWP contain their opinions, and not all readers will always agree 100% with what any of us have recommended. It’s kind of a given, in my honest opinion.

          In any case, I’ll ask the editor if a disclaimer is needed.

          Thanks for the comment.

  32. michaeltieso

    Do people really look at other peoples Twitter feed from their site?

    1. Charnita Fance

      Author

      I can’t speak for everyone, but I do. If I’m searching for information and happen to see their latest tweets in the sidebar or something, I’ll check them out.

  33. marrie

    I love the idea of using a combination of all of these plugins. I might actually give them a try as traffic to my blog is not all that good and not everyone has a twitter client they can use, besides the twitter website anyways. Good job.

  34. Fredrik Hed

    What’s the sharing widget you are using here to the left? It’s neat and very nice, thanks 🙂

    1. Charnita Fance

      Author

      I’m not sure, Fredrik. Our editor, @tomewer may be able to answer that for you!!

      ~Charnita

  35. Lee

    Hi,

    Thank you for the review of our plugin – WordPress Social Stream 🙂

    1. Charnita Fance

      Author

      You’re welcome!!

    2. sikedestroya

      I must say it looks really nice…

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Add as many websites as you want for free, no credit card required. Sign up and start saving time!



Have questions? Get in touch!