Social Share Icons & Social Share Buttons

FAQ

Please also check the more comprehensive FAQ on http://ultimatelysocial.com/faq

We will try to keep this FAQ section up-to-date, but please note that the latest version of the FAQ might be only available at http://ultimatelysocial.com/faq

I face fundamental issues (the plugin doesn’t load, social share buttons don’t show etc.)

Please ensure that:

• You’re using the latest version of the plugin(s)
• Your site is running on PHP 5.4 or above
• You have CURL activated (should be activated by default)

If you’re not familiar with those please contact your hosting company or server admin.

Please check if you have browser extensions activated which may conflict with the social share buttons. Known culprits include:

• Open SEO Stats (Formerly: PageRank Status) in Chrome
• Adblock Plus in Chrome
• Vine in Chrome

Either de-activate those extensions or try it in a different browser.

If the plugin setting’s area looks ‘funny’ after an upgrade then please clear your cache with String+F5 (PC) or Command+R (Mac).

If you get the error message “Are you sure you want to do this? / Please try again” when uploading the plugin: Some servers may have a low limits with respect to permitted upload times. Please set the values in the “php.ini” file to:

max_execution_time 90
post_max_size 48M

If you don’t know how to do it, please contact your server support / hosting company for that. Tell them you need it for a sharing plugin on WordPress which may take longer to upload as many socialsharing buttons are included in it (larger file size).

If your issue is still not fixed after you’ve followed the steps above, we can provide support as part of our new share to social Premium Plugin: https://www.ultimatelysocial.com/usm-premium/.

I get error messages ‘Error : 7’, ‘Error : 56’, ‘Error : 6’ etc.

Those point to a CURL-issue on your site. Please contact your server admin or your hosting company to resolve it.

The plugin requires CURL for the social share counts and other features.

Social share buttons don’t show

Please ensure you actually placed the social share buttons either as social widget (in your widget area) or as floating icons under question 5). The Premium Plugin makes placing sharing buttons especially easy and also allows you to place sticky buttons on your site, define the placement of the share buttons by margins and many other options, see https://www.ultimatelysocial.com/usm-premium/.

If only some social share buttons show, but not all, then please clear your cache, and check if you may have conflicting browser extensions (e.g. ‘Disconnect’-app in Chrome). Also Ad-Blockers are known culprits, please switch them off temporarily to see if that is the reason.

If the social share buttons still don’t show then there’s an issue with your template. Please contact the creator of your template for that.

If you are referring to specific social share buttons not showing in the plugin itself (e.g. you’re looking for a Whatsapp icon, but it doesnt exist) please note that our Premium Plugin has many more social media share buttons, see https://www.ultimatelysocial.com/usm-premium/

Twitter share counters are not displaying (anymore)

Unfortunately, Twitter stopped providing any social share counter. God knows why.

Changes don’t get saved / Deleted plugin but sharing buttons still show

Most likely you have the WP Cache plugin installed. Please de-activate and then re-activate it.

Links don’t work

Please ensure you’ve entered the ‘http://’ at the beginning of the url (for all social networks). If the share buttons are not clickable at all there is most likely an issue with your template. This is especially the case if you’ve given your social share buttons several features, which should show a pop-up (tooltip) when you move over the share buttons.

I cannot upload social custom buttons

Most likely that’s because you’ve set ‘allow_url_fopen’ to ‘off’. Please turn it to ‘on’ (or ask your server admin to do so, he’ll know what to do. Tell them you need it to upload custom buttons for a social media buttons plugin which are not included yet).

My Youtube button (direct follow) doesn’t work

Please ensure that you’ve selected the radio button ‘Username’ when you enter a youtube username, or ‘Channel ID’ when you entered a channel ID.

Aligning the social share buttons (centered, left- or right-aligned) doesn’t work

The alignment options under question 5 align the sharing icons with respect to each other, not where they appear on the page. Our new Premium Plugin is the best social sharing plugin on the market, allowing you to define also many other button alignments (e.g. within a widget, within shortcode etc.).

Clicking on the RSS button returns funny codes

That’s normal. RSS users will know what to do with it (i.e. copy & paste the url into their RSS readers).

Facebook ‘like’-count isn’t correct

When you ‘like’ something on your blog via facebook it likes the site you’re currently on (e.g. your blog) and not your Facebook page.

The new Premium Plugin also allows to show the number of your Facebook page likes, see https://www.ultimatelysocial.com/usm-premium/.

Sharing doesn’t take the right text or picture

We use the codes from Facebook, Google+ etc. and therefore don’t have any influence over which text & pic is used for sharing.

Note that you can define an image as ‘Featured Image’ which tells Facebok / Google etc. to share that one. You’ll find this ‘Featured Image’ section in your blog’s admin area where you can edit your blog post.

You can crosscheck which image Facebook will share by entring your url on https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/og/object/.

The pop-up shows although I only gave my social share button one share function

The pop-up only disappears if you’ve given your sharing buttons only a ‘visit us’-function, otherwise (e.g. if you gave it ‘Like’ (on facebook) or ‘Tweet’ functions or sharing functions) a pop-up is still needed because the share buttons for those are coming directly from the social media sites (e.g. Facebook, Twitter) and we don’t have any influence over their design.

I selected to display the social sharing buttons after every post but they don’t show

The social sharing buttons usually do show, however not on your blog page, but on your single posts pages. The Premium plugin (https://www.ultimatelysocial.com/usm-premium/) also allows to display the share buttons on your homepage.

Plugin decreases my site’s loading speed

The plugin is one of the most optimized social media plugin in terms of impact on a site’s loading speed (optimized code, compressed pictures etc.).

If you still experience loading speed issues, please note that:

• The more social sharing bottons and invite features you place on your site, the more external codes you load (i.e. from the social media sites; we just use their code), therefore impacting loading speed. So to prevent this, give your sharing buttons only ‘Visit us’-functionality rather than sharing functionalities.

• We’ve programed it so that the code for the social media buttons is the one which loads lasts on your site, i.e. after all the other content has already been loaded. This means: even if there is a decrease in loading speed, it does not impact a user’s experience because he sees your site as quickly as before, only the social media buttons take a bit longer to load.

There might be also other issues on your site which cause a high loading speed (e.g. conflicts with our plugins or template issues). Please ask your template creator about that.

Also, if you’ve uploaded social media sharing buttons not provided by the plugin itself (i.e. custom buttons) please ensure they are compressd as well.

After moving from demo-server to live-server the follow or subscribe link doesn’t work anymore

Please delete and install the plugin again.

If you already placed the code for a subscription form on your site, remove it again and take the new one from the new plugin installation.

When I try to like or share via Facebook, I get error message ‘App Not Setup: This app is still…’

If you get the error message…

‘App Not Setup: This app is still in development mode, and you don’t have access to it. Switch to a registered test user or ask an app admin for permissions.’

…then most likely you’re curently logged in with a business account on Facebook. Please logout, or switch to your personal account.

There are other issues when I activate the plugin or place the share buttons

Please check the following:

The plugin requires that CURL is instaled & activated on your server (which should be the standard case). If you don’t have it, please contact your hosting provider.

Please ensure that you don’t have any browser extension activated which may conflict with the plugin, esp. those which block certain content including the share buttons. Known culprits include the ‘Disconnect’ extension in Chrome or the ‘Privacy Badger’ extension in Firefox.

If issues persist most likely your theme has issues which makes it incompatible with our plugin. Please contact your template creator for that. As part of the Premium Plugin (https://www.ultimatelysocial.com/usm-premium/) we fix also theme issues, and provide support to ensure that your social media share buttons appear on your site (exactly where you want them).

How can I see how many people share or like my posts?

You can see this by activating the sharnig ‘counts’ on the front end (under question 5 in the plugin). This will display the counters in little bubbles showing how often people share your posts.

We cannot provide you this data in other ways as it’s coming directly from the social media sites. One exception: if you like to know when people start to follow you by email, then you can get email alerts. For that, please claim your feed.

How can I change the ‘Please follow & like us :)’?

You can change it in the Widget-area where you dropped the widget with the sharing buttons on the sidebar. Please click on it (on the sidebar), it will open the menu where you can change the text.

If you don’t want to show any text, just enter a space (‘ ‘).

How can I remove the credit-link (‘Powered by Ultimatelysocial’)?

Please note that we didn’t place the credit link without your consent (you agreed to it when de-selecting the email button).

Open the first question in the plugin (‘1. Which sharing buttons do you want to show on your site?’), on the level of the email button you see a link on the right hand side. Please click it to remove the credit link.

Can I use a shortcode to place the share buttons?

Yes, it’s [DISPLAY_ULTIMATE_SOCIAL_ICONS]. You can place it into any editor. If the sharing buttons still don’t show, there might be an issue with your theme.

Alternatively, you can place the followin into your codes:

In some cases there might be issues to display social media sharing buttons which you uploaded as custom buttons. In this case, we provide support as part of our premium plugin: https://www.ultimatelysocial.com/usm-premium/

Can I get more options for the social share buttons next to posts?

Please use this plugin for that: https://www.ultimatelysocial.com/usm-premium/. This allows you to place more share buttons (e.g. including Linkedin) as well as giving you more configuration options.

Can I also give the email button a ‘mailto:’ functionality?

Yes, that is possible in our new social share plugin, the Premium Plugin: https://www.ultimatelysocial.com/usm-premium/

To get the email button in the same design style you picked, activate it, then on the front-end, rightclick on the button, and save it as picture. Upload that picture as custom button.

Can I also display the share buttons vertically?

Yes, that is possible in our new social sharing plugin, the Premium Plugn: https://www.ultimatelysocial.com/usm-premium/.

How can I change the text on the ‘visit us’-buttons?

Use this plugin: https://www.ultimatelysocial.com/usm-premium/

Can I deactivate the social sharing buttons on mobile?

Yes, there’s an option for that under question 5. In our new Premium Plugin you can define different settings of the share buttons for mobile, see https://www.ultimatelysocial.com/usm-premium/. The best way to share social media! 🙂

How can I use two instances of the plugin on my site?

You cannot use the same plugin twice, however you can install both the first USM plugin (https://wordpress.org/plugins/ultimate-social-media-icons/) as well as the Premiuem plugin (https://www.ultimatelysocial.com/usm-premium/). We’ve developed the code so that there are no conflicts and they can be used in parallel.

Where can I find icons for more social media platforms?

The premium plugin offrs many more social buttons from other social media platforms such as Snapchat, Whattsapp, Yelp, Sound cloud and many others. It’s the best socialsharing plugin on the market 🙂 Check it out at https://www.ultimatelysocial.com/usm-premium/