Have you come across a site that shows their social media followers count along with the icons? Recently, one of our users asked us if there was an easy way to show their social media follower count as text in WordPress without writing any code. In this article, we will show you how to display social media followers count as text in WordPress.
First thing you need to do is install and activate the Social Count Plus plugin. Upon activation, you need to go to Settings » Social Count Plus to enter your social media profiles.
First you need to enter your Twitter username without the @ sign. e.g. wpbeginner.
To obtain Twitter consumer key, consumer secret, access token, and access token secret keys, you need to visit Twitter Developer website and create a Twitter App. Don’t worry it sounds harder than it really is, and we will walk you through the process.
First you need to sign in with your Twitter username and password. Once you are logged in, you need to click on your Profile photo at the top right corner of the screen and from the dropdown click on My Applications.
Twitter will either show you some apps that you previously created, or it will tell you that you currently don’t have any applications. In either case, you need to click on Create New App button.
On the next screen, provide a name for your app, add some description, and enter your website’s URL. After that check the ‘I agree’ box below the terms and conditions. Lastly, click on the Create Your Twitter Application button.
Twitter will now create your application, and you will land on your application settings page. There you need to click on the API Settings tab. On the API Settings, scroll down to your access token section and click on the Generate my access token button. Twitter will reload the page and show you a notification that an access token has been generated for you. After that you need to click on the Test oAuth button.
On the next screen, you will all the keys you need to copy and paste Social Count Plus settings on your WordPress site.
After entering your Twitter keys, you can add your Facebook page ID. To obtain your Facebook page ID, you need to click on Edit Page while viewing your page as an admin.
Rest of the options are easy. You can add your YouTube Profile, YouTube Channel URL, Google Plus page, Instagram, SoundCloud, etc. You can also choose to display your total post and comment count. Once you are done, click on the Save Changes button to store your settings.
Choosing Design For Social Media Follower Count Buttons
Social Count Plus comes with 6 different button design settings to choose from. You can also choose the text color for the follower count text by going to the Design tab in Social Counts Plus settings.
After choosing a design for your Social Count buttons, you need to click on the Save Changes button to store your settings.
Displaying Social Count on Your Site
You can display your social count buttons using widget, shortcodes, and template tags. If you want to add the Social Count buttons to your blogs sidebar, then you need to go to Appearance » Widgets and drag and drop Social Count Plus widget to your sidebar.
The plugin comes with a number of shortcodes and functions which you can use in your posts, pages, or your theme’s template files to display Social Count buttons. A list of these shortcodes and functions are available on the plugin’s settings page under the Shortcodes and Functions tab.
We hope this article helped you display your social media followers count as text on your WordPress blog.
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The plugin is not available anymore on wordpress
Thank you for letting us know, we will be sure to look into alternative options.
In my wordpress website I am not able to trace from where the social counter is working. The FB, twitter and other are showing but with zero value.
Hi,
First of all thank you for your tips and tricks.
I have from nowhere lost all my twitter and pinterest and some google+ social counts in my posts. Facebook still works. I haven’t changed permalinks.
wish this included Pinterest!
Great tutorial. I’ve managed to get everything working in my blog page, reglazeglasses4u.co.uk/blog.html using the widgets but I can’t get any of the icons to show up on either pages or posts using the shortcodes. Any ideas?
Anyone else struggle with the G+ API?
I was able to generate a G+ API, but it’s not displaying my G+ follower count. Bummer.
Wow! This is very easy tutorial to install Social Count Plus plugin and then develop application on Twitter in order to display social media followers count as text. I didn’t try this on my blog but after finding this tutorial I will experience it on my blog to make it prettier
It is always a keen query done by bloggers. The main point is about designing the website in which social media icons helps a lot. The question asked by many about arranging these buttons followed by the number count under them is a matter to solve. I hope the plugin about which you have explained will work properly.
Thanks for sharing.
Hi, and please excuse my english… I’m fighting with this plugin that seems really good but the facebook counter doesn’t grow up
I tried with my facebook id, and with before my id like recommended here : http://wordpress.org/support/topic/fb-not-updating but my facebook count is frozen at 85 therefore it’s now 97
so I’m searching for another one…
We think that plugin author can help you better, we did not face this issue while testing the plugin.
The Claudio Sanches is really magnificent! Success guy, congratulations!
This plugin is very good, I use it on my blog since the first version. Thanks, Claudio Sanches available for it.
I never imagined that someday my plugin would have some here: D
Many thanks for talking about my plugin *____*
The pleasure is ours, thanks for writing this useful plugin
Nice plugin! Thanks for sharing.
Thanks for the info.
This seems very complicated for something one sees on many sites. My old wordpress.com site displayed total followers automatically if I used its publicize function.
Isn’t there an easier way with a plugin?
We found this to be the easiest way to accomplish this. Just follow through the instructions step by step. Let us know which part feels more complicated to you and we will try to further explain it for you.