Socialized adds social media sharing buttons to your posts, pages, and custom post types that are automatically integrated with Google Analytics using campaign parameters. When a user shares your post using these buttons, they can share a vanity URL that is either automatically generated or customized by you and is specific to that button. When another user on social media then clicks on that shared link, the vanity URL redirects them to your page with analytics tracking automatically.
By adding campaign parameters to the destination URLs, you can collect information about the overall efficacy of these campaigns, and also understand where the campaigns are more effective. For example, your “Summer Sale” campaign might be generating lots of revenue, but if you’re running the campaign on several social media platforms, you’ll want to know which of them is sending you the customers who generate the most revenue. Or if you’re running different versions of the campaign via email, video ads, and in-app ads, you can compare the results to see where your marketing is most effective.
The campaign parameters that are automatically added are sent to Google Analytics when a user clicks on one of the shared links, and the related data is available in the campaigns reports. Below is a list of the campaign parameters that are added and their possible values:
utm_id
- value: socialized
utm_source
- possible value(s): facebook
| twitter
| linkedin
| bluesky
| pinterest
| email
| vanity-url
utm_medium
- possible value(s): social
| email
| vanity-url
utm_content
- possible value(s): socialized-share-link
utm_campaign
- value: socialized
| or define in Settings
utm_term
- value: Defined by typing in the text field in the metabox on the post or page | or the “Focus keyphrase” by Yoast SEO
utm_creative_format
- value: user-share-link
utm_marketing_tactic
- value: prospecting
Shortened URLs
This plugin can automatically shorten your URLs
without using any external URL shortener services or APIs! This makes it so
your website's domain is still the one being shared. You can also customize your short URLs.
Your permalink struture will not be affected. The randomly generated vanity URLs are automatically created when you save the post.
Learn more about custom campaigns in Google.
Analytics Ready
When users click on your shortened URLs that get shared out in the wild, they automatically have customized parameters assigned. Google Analytics 4 automatically picks up on the UTM parameters but other analytics platforms like Piwik, Matomo, and any other home-grown platform!
Performance Friendly
All images have been optimized, minified JS and CSS, and you can choose to disable FontAwesome if your site is already loading it. JavaScript loads in the footer either asynchronously or with deferred loading to prevent impacting your site's performance score.
Simple HTML & CSS
If you want to customize the look and feel, the HTML and CSS are very simple so that they can be easily overridden by you.
There are three (3) ways to install my plugin: automatically, upload, or manually.
Install Method 1: Automatic Installation
Automatic installation is the easiest option as WordPress handles the file transfers itself and you don't need to leave your web browser.
- Log in to your WordPress dashboard.
- Navigate to Plugins > Add New.
- Where it says "Keyword" in a dropdown, change it to "Author"
- In the search form, type
TessaWatkinsLLC
(results may begin populating as you type but my plugins will only show when the full name is there)
- Once you've found my plugin in the search results that appear, click the Install Now button and wait for the installation process to complete.
- Once the installation process is completed, click the Activate button to activate my plugin.
- After this plugin is activated, see below for additional instructions for setup.
Install Method 2: Upload via WordPress Admin
This method is a little more involved. You don't need to leave your web browser, but you'll need to download and then upload the files yourself.
- Download my plugin from WordPress.org; it will be in the form of a zip file.
- Log in to your WordPress dashboard.
- Navigate to Plugins > Add New.
- Click the Upload Plugin button at the top of the screen.
- Select the zip file from your local file system that was downloaded in step 1.
- Click the Install Now button and wait for the installation process to complete.
- Once the installation process is completed, click the Activate button to activate it.
- After this plugin is activated, see below for additional instructions for setup.
Install Method 3: Manual Installation
This method is the most involved as it requires you to be familiar with the process of transferring files using an SFTP client.
- Download my plugin from WordPress.org; it will be in the form of a zip file.
- Unzip the contents; you should have a single folder named
socialized
.
- Connect to your WordPress server with your favorite SFTP client.
- Copy the folder from step 2 to the
/wp-content/plugins/
folder in your WordPress directory. Once the folder and all of its files are there, installation is complete.
- Now log in to your WordPress dashboard.
- Navigate to Plugins > Installed Plugins. You should now see my plugin in your list.
- Click the Activate button under my plugin to activate it.
- After this plugin is installed and activated, see below for additional instructions for setup.
After Plugin Activation
- Navigate to Tools > Socialized to change any global settings to fit your needs.
- When creating new posts or editing existing ones, use the meta box to configure settings specific to that post.
- Publish your post to see the buttons on the page.
4.1.0
Release Date: March 5, 2025
- Updated FontAwesome assets to version 6.7.1
- Added Bluesky sharing button
- Fixed a bug for Pinterest sharing that would sometimes try to send the text "No image available" instead of an empty string.
4.0.0
Release Date: September 27, 2023
- Updated FontAwesome assets to version 6.4.2
- Updated Twitter icon to X
- Updated backend admin logo and UI to match other AuRise Creative plugins
- Overhauled plugin code to be more consistent with other AuRise Creative plugins
- Values for the checkbox/switch plugin options are now stored as
1
or 0
instead of the strings true
and false
. DB will update automatically when updating to this version or later.
- Option to individually show or hide the different platforms are now available in the settings
- Filter added to
get_the_excerpt
to remove the text generated by Socialized from appearing
- Using aria-hidden attribute on the "Copied!" tooltip for the vanity URL to improve accessibility
- added
utm_id
paramter with the value of socialized
to all redirecting URLs for Google Analytics 4
- added
utm_creative_format
paramter with the value of user-share-link
to all redirecting URLs for Google Analytics 4
- added
utm_marketing_tactic
parameter with the value of prospecting
to all redirecting URLs for Google Analytics 4
- Displays the query in the backend
- Removed /languages folder in plugin to use WordPress Translate instead
3.0.4
Release Date: July 21, 2023
- Update: marked the plugin ready for WordPress core version 6.3
- Update: updated the
wp_register_script()
and wp_enqueue_script()
functions to load assets with async
and defer
attributes
3.0.3
Release Date: October 27, 2022
- Fix: Added the
nofollow
value to the rel
attribute for frontend sharing links to help reduce unnecessary crawling by search engines.
3.0.2
Release Date: September 26, 2022
- Fix: Fixed a fatal error that "DOMDocument" was not found.
Older Releases
Please see our
additional changelog.txt file